Redefining the role of design

Albert Einstein famously remarked: "Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted."  To paraphrase: our ability to measure something is no guarantee that this will tell us anything of value. And some of the things that we can't measure may actually be of very great importance to us.

The 1987 Brundtland Report that originally defined the concept of sustainable development aimed at promoting two key outcomes: first, a more considered use of limited resources and secondly, improved intergenerational responsibility. In the past twenty five years we have mainly focused on the conservation of resources, which is comparatively easy to measure. But, intergenerational responsibility; how would we go about measuring that? It is clearly of value to us; not least when we are considering young people, education and schools.

The disciplines of architecture and design have tended to concentrate their efforts on reduction of energy use and CO2 emissions. However, design and architecture are capable of addressing a much broader notion of sustainability. Here we will discuss how the Design Council seeks to promote intergenerational responsibility through education and school design and why it is such an important moment to be doing this.

Building communities
At a time when some local communities are experiencing a profound disconnect between generations, how can mutual respect be encouraged between all members of a community, whether young or old? And how can design even begin to address this?

Although both design and architecture have a broad impact on people's lives and the way they interact with each other, we intend to focus on young people, their education and their experience of being at school.

First, there are two main ways that design can impact on a student's school career. Some may elect to study design technology, which could lead them to a future in the creative industries. Secondly, students are necessarily affected by the school building itself, which is a seminal and unavoidable lesson in architecture.

So we are actually dealing with two discrete questions. Firstly, is it possible that a design curriculum could equip a student with an inherently socially responsible attitude? And secondly, how might a school building foster a sense of community?

Design as problem solver
Since the Brundtland Report 25 years ago, there have been a lot of changes at the Design Council. In April 2011 CABE (Commission for Architecture and Built Environment) and the Design Council joined forces. This means we are now well placed to give a strong voice to architecture and design, and to promote design and architecture for the public good.

Through our business support services and challenge programmes the Design Council demonstrates how design can help solve some of society's challenges and promote growth in the economy. Alongside this, the Design Council CABE team deliver a range of services, such as design reviews, which provide expert advice on the design quality of schemes in England that will have a significant impact on their environment. Within education, our aim is to enhance design in schools by making it better connected to the design industry whilst more engaged with pressing social questions, and we run the Design Challenges for Schools programme to do this. This programme embraces projects that deal explicitly with the conservation of resources, but they also address community issues such as social isolation and community cohesion.

The programme partners schools with a design mentor (a Design Ambassador) to tackle a range of issues including: environmental sustainability (Eco Design Challenge); water conservation (Water Design Challenge); and social and emotional isolation amongst older adults (Keeping Connected Design Challenge).

A better design education?
We believe design can play a role in engendering a sense of responsibility in young people, at a time when the policy landscape poses both a threat and an opportunity to this. Citizenship has been removed from the curriculum as has support for Sustainable Schools and Extended Schools. The National Curriculum is under review, and though not due to report back till next year, it is likely Design and Technology (DT) will no longer be compulsory at Key Stage 3, and that the English Baccalaureate will push DT further into the wilderness at Key Stage 4.

As the Design Council attempts to redefine the role of design to government, communities and business, could this potential crisis for DT as a subject provide the opportunity to redefine design in schools for the better?

So what is currently wrong with design education in schools? There is undoubtedly some great practice. But the subject is too often based on a linear approach to design, responding to a fairly mundane brief.

This is not the fault of the teacher but, as Ofsted acknowledge, the structure of the curriculum itself – which places emphasis on making rather than thinking. Designing for the 21st century requires both making (doing) and thinking - they are not mutually exclusive.

The Royal Society for the Arts recently reported that for DT teachers: 'the acquisition of specialist technical knowledge takes on a greater urgency than learning about design.' Too often DT is taught by teachers with little or no design education. Rather than 'teach first', perhaps we should look at 'design first, teach second'?

DT not only fails to align with government priorities, but fails to align to the design industry, and fails to demonstrate how design can help solve big issues and foster a sense of social responsibility. We are not saying that design is the panacea to all the world's problems. What design can do however, is give the next generation the skills to create affirmative action - through the thinking and doing skills that it engenders.

Can design make students socially responsible?
Could approaches such as Design Challenges for Schools succeed where DT hasn't? The Keeping Connected Design Challenge aimed to demonstrate how design-led solutions could enhance independent living and quality of life for older adults. The challenge asked students to co-design services (e.g. meals on wheels) with older adults that will keep them better connected to younger people, their community and the wider world.

With support from their Design Ambassador schools worked with older adult research participants from their local community to develop ideas, and many new positive relationships emerged. Judge Meadow Community College in Leicester greatly improved relations with the warden-assisted housing on its doorstep through design approaches which encouraged collaborative working such as user mapping and prototyping of services – and that relationship continues to flourish. Essa Academy in Bolton trialled their Brainy Tech service which involved students teaching older adults computing skills in the classroom, and plan to continue to do so (for a small fee).

As part of the challenge, schools were provided with a range of service design tools. The tools enabled younger and older adults to work collaboratively and develop a greater understanding of the wishes, needs and aspirations of one another. As one student commented at the end of the project: “Old people are similar to us and we treat them as if they are aliens.” And of the older adults who took part, 95 per cent surveyed said their view of young people had improved as a result of the challenge.

When asked what the most valuable achievement for the school was, one teacher reported: “Making contact with local groups working with older adults, the concept is sound and we will try to develop it within the school. Linking with the local community for a school like ours is difficult, the majority of our students are first generation British, refugees or otherwise with no links to the fixed population. They are cross cultural within the school but hardly ever make links with others outside that group. Keeping Connected enabled us to create not just intergenerational links with our local community but intercultural links too.”

The winning school, Stoke Newington School & Sixth Form in Hackney, have won £5,000 to implement their design idea, Enrich. Enrich is a service that keeps younger and older adults connected by meeting on the school premises to take part in activities including cookery, dance, and gardening. The service, led and managed by the students, will enable them to meet new people, make best use of the school’s resources, whilst placing the school at the hub of the community.

The design process used in the Design Challenge puts emphasis on user-centred and co-design approaches. The student/designer is encouraged to not just design for but to design with the user group. By doing so, and engaging with members of the community they may have no reason to come into contact with otherwise, the design process helps to embed a sense of intergenerational responsibility (Stoke Newington was near the centre of the recent riots in London, therefore now more than ever is a key moment to bring the community together).

Two of the schools that didn’t make it through to the final are going to start their Keeping Connected service anyway. Both the RSA Academy in Tipton and Penrice Community College will start services that will involve using the schools premises for volunteer pupils and older adults to engage in skills swap classes. This highlights that the application of a user centred design methodology led to identifying a real need and a practical solution. It is doubtful these services would’ve happened without the Challenge taking place.

Considered use of limited resources
A challenge programme that has dealt explicitly with the conservation of resources is the Water Design Challenge with Southern Water. While some water and energy companies focus on retrofits and hitting arbitrary targets set by regulators (how many spare energy light bulbs are you currently in possession of?), Southern Water recognised they needed to work with their customers and sought the help of Design Council to enable them to do this.

Currently embarking on one of the largest meter installation programmes in UK, Southern Water wanted to facilitate behaviour change in order to see the sustained reduction in water consumption that is required. The Water Design Challenge was developed to both help schools reduce their water consumption and to develop a sense of social responsibility.  Southern Water saw the Design Challenge approach as entirely complimentary to their infrastructure programme. They could have taken a purely engineering based approach of for example desalinating sea water, as other water companies have done. However, solutions like this are often expensive and damaging to the environment. Instead, through the application of the design process, they sought the prevention is better than cure approach.

Winning ideas from the Water Design Challenge include a girls urinal (Full flush, Mini flush which could save 50 per cent of water per flush) and a museum in a portaloo (Worlds’ Smallest Water Museum which gives tips on behaviour change through an interactive quiz). The best design solutions were both innovative and inspiring.

The World’s Smallest Water Museum (by Sholing Technology College) has been touring London and the South East for the past ten months, with hundreds of people queuing up to go to the loo. The Full-flush, Mini-flush team (from Fort Pitt Grammar) have just been awarded £9,000 to develop their idea into a professional prototype. Local businesses and the local authority are showing interest in trialling the system and the students are looking to patent the concept.

In recognition of the creativity in science and technology that the challenge stimulates, all students have now gained CREST Silver awards for taking part.

How might a school building foster a sense of community?
Over the past few years, the Schools Panel at CABE reviewed the design of more than 300 new educational schemes which demonstrated that there were many ways to address the sustainability agenda. Some of the more interesting approaches considered the impact of the building in use; two quite different schools in Hertfordshire offer a good illustration of this.

At Nobel School in Stevenage, the head teacher, Alastair Craig, embedded his learning programme into the local neighbourhood, with an on-site community centre and strong connections to the parish church and adjacent primary school. Unfortunately government changes have scaled back Craig’s capacity to offer outreach work through extended community hubs, but he is pursuing the same agenda through the third sector with the Stevenage Educational Trust. The design for the new school proposed to take this a step further by incorporating the Stevenage Music and Arts Centre. Craig aimed to open 24/7 throughout the year and welcome the whole community into the building for life-long learning. In the new school he will at least be opening till 10pm. The proposal is so expansive he even hesitated about calling it a school. Naturally, this approach requires careful thought to ensure that the children are secure at all times, but surely such thinking is bound to foster a strong sense of intergenerational responsibility?

Just down the road at Marriotts School, head teacher Patrick Marshall has a different concern. He is convinced that many of his disadvantaged students have significant unrealised potential that is held back simply by their own low aspirations. He describes their attitude as “So Stevenage!” There is little around them to suggest that they could go on to greater things.

A new inspirational building is a catalyst to trigger such a sense of self-worth; to quote Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

Frustrated at waiting for funding to enable them to implement sustainable changes,  the students and head at Ashley School in Surrey decided to take matters into their own hands, imagining ways to reduce their carbon footprint through means that were already at hand. They began to examine their own behaviour, carefully measuring their use of energy. Through a thoughtful and disciplined approach and by implementing a few simple alterations to the school fabric they managed to reduce their energy use by a massive and measurable 51 per cent. The energy saving was a great success, but the greater success was instilling a sensitivity, discipline and responsibility in a whole generation of students; we can’t begin to measure the impact of this.

Controlling Environments
There are many other new schools that employ passive design principles or computer controlled environments to maintain an optimum learning environment, automatically opening and closing windows and louvers. Unfortunately, in these passive environments the students are also passive; they will never have the opportunity to learn how their behaviour can affect their environment. The fact that this loss is unquantifiable does not diminish its seriousness.

Popular and successful programmes such as CABE’s Green Day (now managed by the Landscape Institute) support schools wanting to work more sustainably, providing resources and activities that teachers could use from KS1-3. It also supports school staff to better understand their buildings and spaces and how they contribute to climate change by making changes in their school estate.  Similarly, Engaging Places, focused on learning outside the classroom and helping young people to appreciate the built environment in their local communities. But with funding reduced for these programmes, what now for educational outcomes that cannot always be counted?

Conclusion
Design alone can’t change the world, but design approaches which provide a way to tackle problems and connect people to the spaces and places around them, can help pave the way. Our discussion here provokes two final questions.

Is it not unacceptably wasteful to fail to make maximum use of our learning environments? And through more intensive community use, could the divisions between generations that are implicit in traditionally organised institutions be broken down? With an economy that demands that we do more with less, we can no longer meet our demands by more building or greater use of resources. What is required is a behavioural change and the Design Council encourages and promotes such change.

It’s hard to measure the impact of greater awareness and responsibility; but to return to Einstein: sometimes the things that are hard to measure may turn out to be the most valuable.

For more information
www.designcouncil.org.uk
www.engagingplaces.org.uk/home