Knowledge of design practice DVC 6-3
Achievement Standard 1.34 AS 91067
Design practice focuses on developing conceptual designs in response to a brief. Knowledge of design practice includes understanding that designers identify the qualities and potential of design ideas in terms of the broad principles of design (aesthetics and function) and sustainability, and that they are influenced by societal, environmental, historical and technological factors.
Learning Objective: DVC 6-3
Students will:
- Demonstrate understanding of design principles and processes, and the work of influential designers
Indicators
Students can:
- select and research an influential designer.
- identify and explain the aesthetic and functional characteristics of their chosen influential designer.
- integrate aesthetic and functional characteristics of chosen influential designer when developing their own design ideas.
Progression
Prior to level 6 students should develop foundation understanding and skills through a junior technology programme (which may include a specialist DVC course), where students learn to understand and appreciate a broad awareness of three-dimensional design, through knowledge of design elements and principles.
At level 6 students have progressed to demonstrate their understanding of how different design elements and perspectives are used within iconic and significant design works to inform their own design practice.
The Teacher Guidance section provides information that supports teachers scaffolding of learning from levels 1-8 of the curriculum. This allows for differentiation of a programme of learning.
The deliberate use of provide, guide, and support in this section signals that as students' capacity for self-management increases, teachers progressively reduce the level of scaffolding provided.
- Provide – the teacher should take full responsibility for introducing and explicitly teaching new knowledge, skills or practices.
- Guide – the students have a level of understanding and competency on which they can draw but the teacher remains primarily responsible for continuing to develop these.
- Support – the students take primary responsibility for their own learning, drawing on all their previous experiences to consolidate and extend their understanding. The teacher is supportive rather than directive.
- The Teacher Guidance also uses the term ensure to indicate when the teacher plays a monitoring role to check that conditions critical for learning are present.
Teacher Guidance
To support students to develop understandings about design principles, approaches and the work of influential designers at level 6, teachers could:
- Develop understandings of two principles of design (aesthetics and function) and of their derived elements; such as shape, form, rhythm, balance, proportion, colour, contrast, durability, stability, flexibility/rigidity.
- Investigate key designers to develop an understanding of their design history and its continued impact.
- Promote opportunities for students to investigate different designers design practice to initiate and develop their own ideas.
- Promote students to ask questions of a given brief and explore the constraints in creative ways and to look for new directions.
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Contexts for teaching and learning
- Teach students about the design principles and visual design elements. Mix and match activities, creating illustrations of key terms to understand definitions can be useful for classroom display.
- Provide a broad overview on the works of different designers, their style and the key design characteristics that define them.
- Teach students how to analyse design works, by identifying the context, background, design features and characteristics; in terms of aesthetics and function.
- Gather a collection of imagery to introduce the influential designers body of work to allow students to interpret common or typical characteristics.
- Have robust conversation about the difference between design "replicas / copied styling" and being influenced by a particular style and interpreting it in your own way.
- Provide a design context that will engage students’ interests; to then generate design ideas that integrate the typical characteristics of selected influential designer.
Encourage students to:
- Create an inspiration board to begin generating ideas so they have plenty of visual stimuli to work from.
- Briefly annotate their design thinking as thoughts on how they have used the designers’ work as an influence in their own design ideas.
- To "think outside" the box rather than literally
- To consider the identified characteristics within a new "lens" to make it relevant and meaningful in a new context.
- Utilise identified characteristics and apply to a different design context/field, e.g. taking the characteristics of an architect’s work and applying these qualities to a piece of furniture – a useful ideation strategy with benefits of developing ideation skills for generating and initiating ideas at the higher levels
- Analyse the different attributes of existing designs and recognise/appreciate the intentions and key traits of the designer’s body of work
Literacy considerations
Support students to understand the language associated with the assessment as well as the design language related to visual elements and key principles of design. Refer to the following pages in the glossary of design terms:
Aesthetics
Function
Resources to support teaching and learning
- Reference books on NZ Architects, Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Peter Eisenman, Ron Arad, Jonathon Ives, Philippe Stark, Charles and Ray Eames, Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Louis Khan, Santiago Calatrava and Jean Novel are a great starting point.
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Assessment for qualifications
The following achievement standard(s) could assess learning outcomes from this learning objective:
Last updated March 13, 2024
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