Design Strategies

Ask twenty students to design a new chair and you will get twenty chairs. Four legs, a seat, a back, some variation in the shape of the back. Not one of them decided to have four legs; they all simply drew what a chair looks like, and by the time the pencil touched the paper the interesting decisions had already been made by somebody else, years ago. That is design fixation, it is the most common failure in this subject, and the whole of this lesson is a set of tools for escaping it.

The specification names five strategies that can be applied when generating imaginative and creative design ideas: collaboration, user centred design, a systems approach, iterative design and avoiding design fixation. It then asks how you explore and develop your own ideas using an iterative process of sketching, modelling, testing and evaluation of your work to improve outcomes. This is designing and making principles content, examined in Section C of Paper 1, where collaboration alone was worth six marks, and it is also the topic the design and make task's criterion for generating design ideas is written around.