Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT)

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DESIGNING OUR TOMORROW (DOT): engaging secondary school teachers in the principles and tools of inclusive design to enable their students to think creatively.INCLUSION AND CREATIVITY In the UK, inclusion is an important topic on different social levels and the need for change in government and industry to reduce exclusion in society is recognised. Over nearly 10 years the i~design research programme, funded by the EPSRC, has engaged effectively with policy makers, industry and designers. It has proved that inclusive design practice can act as a platform for creativity. Through conducting inclusive design challenges with school pupils as part of university outreach activities, the practice of inclusive design has further proven to be an effective way to 'teach' creativity.Promoting creativity in education is identified as a key priority in education (HMIE report Emerging Good Practice in Promoting Creativity, March 2006), it identified the principal purpose of education as enabling all children and young people to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors; among the skills required for this purpose is the ability to think creatively and independently .APPLYING NEW KNOWLEDGE TO REAL WORLD PROBLEMS This public engagement addresses ways in which approaches to teach creative thinking in schools can be embedded with inclusive design principles in order to inspire young people to create a more inclusive world.It builds on a strong track record of investigation, expertise and publication by the research team at the Engineering Design Centre (EDC), University of Cambridge, led by Professor John Clarkson and managed by experience design consultant, Ian Hosking working closely with Bill Nicholl from the Faculty of Education, design researcher Dr Yanki Lee from the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre and Ergonomics & Design Researcher Eddy Elton from the Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute (ESRI) Loughborough University.EFFECTIVE ENGAGEMENT The project brings together a strong team of inclusive design researchers in collaboration with pedagogy theory experts. It sets out to engage teachers and their pupils to develop new approaches of teaching creativity in schools.6 invited schools in three areas across the UK (London, Cambridge and Loughborough) where the partners are based will be the first group to adopt inclusive design principles into their Key Stage 3 (KS3) Design & Technology (D&T) classes. Throughout the process, observation and evaluation will be conducted and reflected back in the development of the tools.The first collaboration with six schools will reach 1800 new pupils every year in KS3 classes. The purpose of the project is to conduct inclusive design challenges with teachers in the 6 selected schools to give them a hands-on experience to test and question the principles of inclusive design and co-develop a new set of tools to inspire creativity. The expectation is that a number of the schools (3 out of the 6) will also adapt the principle of inclusive design beyond KS3. In addition to the 6 schools the project will aim to sign up at least 100 teachers who are interested in using the resources. This will primarily be done through one of the partners to the proposal, the Design & Technology Association (DATA). Even with a very conservative 10% conversion rate of these teachers, it will give an additional 3,000 pupils per year. If the conversion rate reaches 30% then a total of 9,000 new KS3 pupils will be reached an annual basis bring the total to over 10,000Special training sessions during 2010-11, will also be conducted for the D&T initial teacher education programme, and partnership schools of Cambridge University, which trains 20 D&T teachers annually. This also gives access to a further 25 schools which means that if 30% of schools adopt DOT, then potentially another 2,500 pupils per annum will be reached.