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By Prof. Daniel Charny MBE, Co-founder and director of Fixperts
A new iteration of the Fixperts programme is currently in the early stages of exploration, aiming to provide refreshed opportunities for schools, colleges, universities and educators to embed purposeful human-centred design and climate education into their curriculums. For nearly 12 years, Fixperts has been a valued programme that has proposed more for Design and Technology education, through authentic real-world projects, meaningful contexts, genuine problem solving through real-life conversations and hands-on design prototyping.
Created by designers Prof. Daniel Charny and Dee Halligan at the learning and skills consultancy, Forth, Fixperts has infiltrated education establishments, teacher training programmes, and embedded itself into the D&T curriculum. It has also featured in exhibitions across the globe, and seen designers trained as Fixperts go on to launch businesses and careers across the creative and social sectors. At its heart, it compels designing to tackle real social needs, shifting design away from superficial wants. It connects learners to people, placing them in a situation in which empathy, creativity and technical knowledge are required to shape solutions that matter.
What is Fixperts?
Fixperts is a learning programme that challenges young people (Fixperts) to use their imagination and skills to create ingenious solutions to everyday problems for a real person (the Fixpartner). These problems can be as simple as dressing yourself independently or opening a door more easily and as complex as chopping vegetables with one hand or attaching a pram to a wheelchair. The projects require an investigative mindset from the outset. Ideas are generated and prototyped, tested by the Fixpartner, and refined until a final outcome is achieved. Throughout the process the Fixperts develop a host of valuable transferable skills from listening, prototyping, collaboration and story telling. Many of the projects in universities have been captured as short films and curated into playlists, perfect for educators to get to know the programme, and an ideal gateway for young learners.
Since inception, Fixperts has been adopted and adapted into a range of teaching formats to suit schools and universities, from half hour to hour-long activities, half day workshops to a term-long project, relevant to any creative design, engineering and STEM/STEAM studies.
Why do Design and Technology educators value the programme so highly?
Whilst the national curriculum and GCSE specifications have offered content and a framework to interpret, Fixperts is a programme that applies everything that D&T is aiming to be, into a learning experience which feels close to the way industry works. The majority of trainee teachers lucky enough to be exposed or trained in Fixperts during their training year, adopt the programme or aspects of it, into their teaching practice. Rather than designing hypothetical products for imaginary users, learners design with a purpose and for real people. This is the essential ingredient to making Fixperts a global success.
What can schools do with the Fixperts programme?
Fixperts is entirely open source, so with no paywalls or barriers to accessing the resources, and no expectation to be trained prior to use, it really is only the educator who is the barrier to bringing Fixperts or elements of Fixperts into the D&T curriculum. In its formal structured set of resources, Fixperts is a programme that will map easily into Key Stage 3, 4 or 5 Design and Technology, shaping the pre qualification learner experiencing, or enhancing the qualification journey and outcome. Post school, university level degree programmes in engineering and design can and have used Fixperts to create modules in human-centred, inclusive or innovation design (Over 60 universities worldwide have run the programme in their assessed curriculum).
A typical school based Fixperts project would include the following:
● The identification of a Fixpartner from the school or local community
● The conducting of interviews and observational research of that Fixpartner
● The defining of problem identification and design criteria linked to the Fixpartners needs
● The generation of a wide range of concepts through sketching and modelling
● The production of working prototypes in a workshop or through digital design and fabrication
● A cycle of iterative testing and feedback with the Fixpartner or guest engineers or designers
● A final solution, which is presented as a story of the person, the problem and the fix, often captured through a short film but also in story boards or posters.
Whilst every design and technology education in the country will be thinking that this sounds exactly like the teaching of the subject of D&T, what sets the programme apart is the mindset it instills in the learners.
Empathy
Learners prioritise understanding their Fixpartners needs in order to achieve a successful design. Novelty and styling are replaced by relevance and purpose
Technical application
Learners will spend more time in the workshop modelling, prototyping, experimenting with electronics or materials, digitally designing and redesigning, and pushing the boundaries of what they can make
Creativity for social good
Creativity, where it benefits society and social needs, is very different to creativity for the sake of creativity. Designs to improve lives and problem solving for and with others are core climate education skills.
Confidence and agency
Learners will discover their capabilities without the constraints of ‘Design, Make, Evaluate’ projects or NEA, and focus more on what it takes to achieve an impactful solution, building up their independence and resilience.
more agile, quick like a design sprint, or help to move beyond such a rigid structure.
Communication and collaboration
Working with Fixpartners, designing and prototyping in teams, presenting their ideas and using real feedback reflects the professional expectations of the programme, and take students beyond the silos of personal and coursework based projects. These are also core climate education skills
Case Study 1: Improving Independent Eating
One Fixperts project featured a learner working with a user who struggled to stabilise bowls and plates while eating one-handed. Through research, prototyping and testing, the student developed a simple non-slip stabilising aid that improved independence and reduced frustration during mealtimes.
What makes this powerful educationally is not just the final product—but the process:
● observing a genuine need
● translating insight into criteria
● iterative prototyping
● evaluating success through lived experience
Case Study 2: Making Carrying Safer and Easier
Another project focused on a Fix Partner who found carrying shopping and personal belongings difficult due to limited grip strength. Students created a custom carrying solution that redistributed load and improved handling.
The technical challenge involved ergonomics, material testing and fastening methods, while the human challenge required listening carefully to how the user moved through daily routines.
For teachers, this demonstrates how Fixperts can merge:
● product design
● ergonomics
● material properties
● user testing
● iterative improvement
Educator Survey
New to Fixperts
Why the Fixperts learning programme needs your help
For 12 years, Fixperts has encouraged the very best approaches to design and technology, moving learners beyond artificial problems, centralising inclusivity, and raising learner engagement in the design process. It is now ready to iterate into a more accessible and impactful programme, suited to our times, and it needs your ideas.
Have your say
We have two surveys which we are seeking engagement in from Design and Technology teachers.
Survey 1: Teachers who have used the Fixperts programme
We want to hear from educators who have engaged with Fixperts, and adopted something from the programme into their own teaching practice or curriculum. If this is you, please use this QR code to respond to a short survey.
Survey 2: Teachers new to the Fixperts programme
For those reading about Fixperts for the first time, we want you to connect to our Fixperts network by filling in our short survey. By completing this you will enable us to send you an email introducing you to Fixperts formally, so that you can very quickly review the resources and adopt what you feel will work in your curriculum. Please use this QR code to engage.
For the subject of Design and Technology to be the best version of itself, it needs initiatives like Fixperts to be setting an ambitious and aspirational example for educators to utilize. For this reason alone, it deserves our participation.
Prof. Daniel Charny MBE FRSA FRCA
Director at Forth
Co-founder and director of Fixperts
Professor of Design at Kingston University
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