Design & Technology Conference 2009: Designerly Thinking

Design & Technology Conference 2009 (Singapore) . 16th March 2009.

I conducted one of the two-hour concurrent session on a two-stage ideation approach as a follow-up from the presentation on "The meaning of designing is meaningful designs" last year during the Design & Technology Seminar (Singapore) 2008.

In the previous presentation I touched on the overview of a lower secondary design approach. This year's focus zooms into the actual ideation process which emphasises on the attitude of an 'ideator' rather than merely a teaching of a certain technique to generate ideas quickly.

Learning or simply being aware (now) of such approach does help in generating ideas very quickly and efficiently, however, the quality mass of ideas at the end of the day still reflects the attitude of the thinker behind the ideation process.

Close to 30 Design & Technology educators from various schools got to understand the mechanisms to the approach as well as experiencing it via actually working on the process; hence the presentation title: "ACTUALLY DOING IT"

The second image shown above are some of my Secondary 1N(A) students who completed the note holder design just in time to be showcased during the presentation. It was pleasant to hear comments from fellow educators that they were amazed that the Secondary 1 normal (academic) students could design a note holder with such quality in terms of design.

Why not?... but not without the persoanl attitude to want to think and to put in the best effort.

Tools and techniques are but just tools and techniques...