Design Diversity

New diverse designers added to GCSE Design and Technology

AQA have added 12 new, diverse designers to our GCSE Design and Technology (8552) specification ready for first teaching in September 2022.

They’ve been working to improve the diversity of designers in section 3.3.3: ‘The work of others’. With help from organisations such as The V&A, The Design Museum, Part W Collective, Higher Education Partners and a fantastic panel of teachers, they’ve improved the specification to include a wider variety of names in this section. The list now includes the following designers:

• Joe Casely-Hayford

• Rei Kawakubo

• Pierre Davis

• David Adjaye

• Yinka Ilori

• Zaha Hadid

• Elsie Owusu

• Karim Rashid

• Kusheda Mensah

• Aljoud Lootah

• Morag Myerscough

• The Singh Twins

AQA are working hard to make sure their qualifications represent the diversity of knowledge and human experience we value – as well as reflecting all the different communities of teachers and students they serve. The designers they’ve chosen represent a wide range of different people and challenge some of the gender stereotypes related to different areas of the subject.

Students have to study two designers from the specification, these additions will give you greater choice when designing.

At Redden Court we encourage diversity and invite our students to research some of these designers shown in the list above and also to consider diversity when designing products throughout KS3/4.

We study about design movements and ask students to embrace different cultures to introduce more creativity in their design work.

In this slide from student development week you can find information about designers Zaha Hadid and Philippe Starck. Zaha Hadid is on the diverse designers list. Unfortunately she passed away in March 2016 but she gave us many iconic architectural designs including the London aquatic centre in Stratford which was built for the 2012 Olympics. Philippe Starck is a very eccentric Product Designer from France who has produced some extremely innovative and unique designs.