Cruel Unintentions

Morning, everyone. My name is Louise Attwood. I work for AQA, and I’m going to spend five minutes, that's a really tricky thing for me, to talk about why design and technology matters.

We could talk for hours and hours on some of these things, and I know the passionate design and technology experts in the room will all have something to say about every single one of these things on this board. The part I want to have my little five-minute soap-box moment about are some of the things you can see on this side of the board over here.

We all know that we’re developing the designers, engineers and creatives of the future but not everybody is going to be one of those. Many are just going to be citizens, colleagues, friends, people we bump into in the street. The key part of design and technology that I think we should be focusing on for all students is developing them as consumers, as citizens, as people within society.

That’s why it’s really, really important to teach students to question things in life; Teaching them to be critical, teaching them to think about the products they use on a day-to-day basis. I think that’s really important in the world we live in today. Particularly right now, the news this week from Belfast is a perfect, awful illustration of why we need to empower students to make a change for the better. I think design and technology gives students the tools to have an opinion and to form the world they want to see. [To Dave] I’m trying to give you your mojo back.

We need to give students permission to be critical of the things they use on a day-to-day basis. We need them to walk around with their eyes open, and we need them to know that they are instrumental in making change. That’s why we were super, super excited to see that the Curriculum and Assessment Review has focused on this idea of inclusive design and social responsibility. It’s something that at AQA we campaigned for for a long time, and we’re really happy to see that's going to be a focus within the new specifications.

I remember in my A-Level days being taught about Victor Papanek’s tin can radio. Many people in the room will know that design and that really inspired me as a student. It inspired me to know that you can design things to make the world a better place, and that you can design things that have a real impact on society. That example is clearly designed for a particular need and a particular community of people, and it’s intended to make their lives better.

But what about designs that are unintentionally biased? Designs that weren’t intended to exclude people, but actually do, and maybe not-even-consciously tell people they shouldn’t be involved in a particular activity?

This is my soapbox moment. It’s something I talk about a lot and I’m really, really passionate about. You may have seen earlier iterations of this slide, because I’ve rolled these examples out many times before. We’ve got examples here of the design of cars and seatbelts: women are 47% more likely than men to be injured in the same car accident because of the design. That gets students really riled up. The injustice of that really gets under their skin and makes them excited about the change they can make.

Then there’s the soap dispenser that uses infrared technology. You put your hand underneath it and it dispenses soap, but only if you’ve got white hands. Examples like that in the classroom can really spark debate.

Obviously, we know that knowledge really matters in the curriculum. But getting students to debate, to think about other people outside of their postcodes, and to challenge their own experiences and assumptions against other people’s, really helps them understand the world they’re living in and that they can make change for the future.

So inclusive design and social responsibility can be a paragraph in a textbook or you can put these examples down in front of students and ask them: Who are these designed for? Who have they excluded? Is that intentional? Probably not. But what can we do about it? And how can we get excited about making change for the better?

I think once students understand that the products we design carry real consequences, they go from passive users to thoughtful, questioning, responsible citizens. And I believe that’s what design and technology can give children in our classrooms: not just for future engineers, but every conscious consumer.