Teachers notes

Design StrategiesDesigning – Inspirational sources

Slide 1 offers an introduction to the designing section with screen shots of the range of tasks available to students. These could act as lesson objectives at the start of a lesson. Slide 2 draws the focus to a key aspect of the situation – for the design to have an organic theme. I have focused on drawing inspiration from organic shapes and what nature has to offer designers as a stimulus.I have found that giving students a visual stimulus to work from really inspires creative design thinking. Slide 3 provides an example (originally from the research section) of plants and flowers that could be used as inspiration. Slides 4 & 5 offer a further example of this – mood boards based on shape and form and line and pattern. You may want to have a bank of images that students can use if they need further inspiration. Using past students exemplar work could also provide a useful stimuli here. Slide 6 provides an example of Raewyn Harris’ work. She is a New Zealand based artist who is inspired by her local landscape, coastline, hills, trees and the sea. She includes the patterns of nature in her paintings and will feature as a strong inspirational source in the next section. Her work could serve as a lesson/topic starter or research homework/extension task.

The designing section offers students a range of tasks to help them be creative in a number of ways. The design strategies offered in this section are: inspirational sources, morphing, modelling and design development. These strategies can be helpful when designing any product. I have aimed for this section to be as visually stimulating and vibrant as possible to draw students attention.

Teachers notes

Design StrategiesDesigning – Morphing

The teacher exemplar - Slides 7 & 8 used Raewyn Harris’ paintings of curled ferns based as its inspiration source. It provided the potential to develop scrollwork – ideal for this organic themed metal project.

Slides 7 & 8 also provide digital examples of morphing, The presentation sequence stops at each stage to allow for discussion or predictions as to what will happen next or what the students could do next to the shape. The presentation also works well running on a loop sequence on the board, reaffirm learning and later serving as a re-cap at the end.

Slides 9 & 10 show examples pupils work of the morphing design strategy. The technique can be successful in a number of different presentation styles (shown by the examples) and works well in an A3 format as a task to stretch the most able/talented/gifted.

Morphing is a design strategy that I have found to significantly help a students ability to think outside the box, be more creative and engage more easily in a design task. Students enjoy it, find it quick to do and they feel rewarded with the quality and quantity of design work that they can produce when using this technique.

Morphing a shape means to develop it step by step – making changes each time e.g. flipping a shape, rotating, repeating, reducing or enlarging. This provides the opportunity to bring in proportion and symmetry etc.

Teachers notes

Design StrategiesDesigning – Modelling and Development

Modelling has been a successful design strategy for developing successful design ideas in this task. Pupils have used thin strips of paper (as seen in Slide 12) will assist them in judging the size, proportion and overall aesthetics of their design. Taking photographic evidence or including their models in their work booklets also provided evidence of alternative methods of designing.

Slide 11 provides pupils with examples of quick idea generation, from this then develops a discussion into design annotation and Slide 14 gives a list of aspects that students may wish to comment about e.g. comments relating to the shape, size, how easy or difficult the tea light holder is to make.

I try to link this concept to the previously taught lesson on product analysis and/or specification, where they were encouraged to use technical language to explain issues such as construction development. Some students excel at justifying materials/joining choices etc. but these suggestions are aimed at the majority of students who would benefit from a direct list to assist with their annotation work.