Design and Technological Awareness in Education

Abstract

(In the course of work in the Royal College of Art's Design Education Unit, there has been considerable discussion on the relation of 'technological awareness' to design activity. The following paper represents part of that discussion).

Design, like science or scholarship, is the product of a distinctive kind of activity and is governed by a distinctive capacity of mind.

Designing and the development of technological awareness, as educative activity, consists in relating and drawing attention to purpose, the self, and the means and significance of Man's intervention in his habitat. Design activity, when distinguished from design-educational activity, is directed towards the manipulation of things and systems so as to achieve the most acceptable and practicable fit between a particular set of desires and needs, on the one hand, and a particular means for fulfilling them, on the other.