Pearson Schools Blog

It’s a warm Thursday afternoon and the air in the D&T classroom is stuffy. I’m designing packaging for a shoe brand, pen on paper, with my Body Shop canvas bag stuffed under the desk. It’s 2001 and I don’t have a mobile phone. My idea of being a designer is to work in graphics or in fashion. I know that designers create things, products, packaging, buildings. But I also know that there is too much waste, people are going hungry, and that global warming is being mentioned. What are my studies in design and other subjects teaching me about changing that? Honestly, nothing really.

Alan Moore, author of Do: Design and Do: Build,  shares his experience of design and engineering from the past 20 years, and provides not only the emotive argument for why we need to educate our young designers differently, but also challenge those who would say that such an approach would disregard the importance of commercially driven activity that the design and engineering industry has been built successfully upon for the past decade.

From the circular economy to regenerative approaches, Alan provides the often lost voice of someone who can reflect back on life experiences and say we may have been going about it in the wrong way, and that by focusing on our responsibility on society and the planet, we don’t have to compromise on innovation and commercial success.

Phil Holton, Senior Qualification Manager at Pearson, discusses the changes made to 4th edition of the Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes (AHEP) and the impact this has on undergraduate and secondary school education, in particular D&T. 

All we do is design...

“All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process […] design is the primary underlying matrix of life.”