farhat ara

This paper presents the strategies employed by Indian middle-school students working in groups to identify three unfamiliar artefacts. The activity described in this paper was aimed at sensitising students to the close link between form and function and to bring a certain ...

In India, design education is generally considered specialist education aimed at preparing future designers rather than educating the general population. However, there are at least two views advocating the inclusion of design in general education. The first is that of design professionals (Cross, 2006; Lawson, 2006) who consider design ability as a form of natural intelligence possessed to some degree

This paper presents an investigation into Indian elementary and middle school students’ images of designers. A ‘Draw a designer at work’ test was used with 511 students from Classes 5 to 9 from a school located in Mumbai. Findings from the study indicate that Indian elementary and middle school students, who had no experience in design and technology education (D&T), perceived designers mostly as fashion/ dress designers or artists and designing was associated less with engineering and technology. These results are consistent with an earlier study on Indian middle school students’ ideas about design and designers using written responses, where students demonstrated an incomplete understanding of design and what designers do and associated design with art (Authors, 2011). In the present study students, mostly older ones depicted gender and professional stereotypes. Design as engineering, making or building were mostly associated with male designers and depicted more often by boys. In...

This paper describes middle school students' participation in structured activities for testing, evaluating, categorising and redesigning familiar products. Six students of Class 8 worked in 3 dyads each, on a set of 4 products performing similar functions, to evaluate, compare and redesign them. The entire interaction of each dyad was audio and video-recorded. Textual and graphical data were in the form of structured responses and redesign proposals, respectively. Findings suggest that dyads tested the products for their efficiency and generated criteria related to their functions and ergonomics. Their testing varied from the most systematic to unsystematic strategies. They categorised the pairs of tongs either based on their appearance, functions or ergonomics. All students identified features in the products that could be redesigned. Students also showed a tendency to propose their redesign ideas around their selected best product design. The findings in the study are tentative and should be interpreted with caution. Finally the pedagogical implications of the study are discussed.

This paper reports on an investigation into middle school students' naïve ideas about, and attitudes towards design and designers. The sample for the survey consisted of students from Classes 7 to 9 from a school located in Mumbai. The data were analysed ...