As part of our inquiry into the role and purpose of design, grade 10s have been exploring Dieter Rams' Principles for Good Design. These have provided us with a starting point from which to evaluate, articulate, and create designs that are meaningful, useful, and focused on the needs of the user.
Through inquiring into these principles students explore their role as a student of design. Most importantly, they moved away from thinking of design as the making of attractive things, and towards the creating of meaningful solutions to authentic problems.
We began this process by generating our own list of criteria that made a design good. Then, we looked at Rams' principles and matched them to our own. Students then dove deeper, researching individual criteria, analyzing existing designs through the lens of the ten principles, and finally, creating a sketchnote showing their own understanding of the principles.
