Happy New Year – Let us Remember Design in 2014!

Happy New to all IB Design Technology teachers and I hope you had a great 2014 and are looking forward to the year ahead in your teaching of Design. It is a great time of year as students come back after the break to review the past year in terms of Design to get your students motivated, interested and hopefully inspired for their design projects ahead. So to help you here are a few resources that I will use to start off the new year with both Grade 11 and 12’s :-

• A greater start is the World Design Rankings for 2014. Start a conversation about how you can actually rank countries according to their criteria – is this biased in anyway? Does Turkey or Great Britain deserve there position? Design Boom as always does a great job of explaining and showing some of the ranked designs, products etc… Finally there is a great section on the same website explaining which design fields are the most competitive – excellent for those students thinking of applying to college for a career in design.
• Top tens of 2014 – there are many in design but check out – top ten bridges of 2014, top ten 3D printing stories in 2014, top ten temporary structures and many more top tens here – all of which are truly inspirational.
• The Guardian’s ten design moments of 2014 also raises a few eyebrows which would your students choose – the wheel maybe?
• How about discussing this provocative quote regarding IKEA – “All the design companies together make 10% of what Ikea makes” – Rolf Fehlbaum .Is this a good thing – if not why not…especially good for the new syllabus which very much looks at mass manufacture?
• Top ten products according to Time Magazine – can you deny that the Tesla S should not be in there?

There are many more websites out there – so start those first lessons with something inspirational rather than let us see where you are going wrong with criterion D of your project!