MY FAVOURITE SUBJECT
This was an RSA brief - to come up with a way to inspire children in year 9 and below to take design and technology subjects in GCSE and beyond.
To find out why children were not taking up these subjects, I went to a school to ask. Through interviews with teachers and students I found there was no material to inspire the children. When the children were asked to do assignments, they would just go to Google or Bing and use the first few images that appeared. There was nothing to inspire them, nothing to make them go 'wow' and this is where the idea came from. I created the design of the website that would be used by the students to find more current and classic designs sourced from design blogs, rather than just using Bing and Google. This would enable them to see more of a variety of images than they normally would. As well as each individual design subject being a category, there would be a student showcase where students from each class and other schools can view each others work to further inspire them.
To go along with the website, a magazine was created. the website would be a good source of visual images for the children to use, but a further change was needed to push them creatively. The aim of this magazine is to provoke group student discussion and encourage an excitement for design and all the areas this spans across. The scale of the magazine and it's image led focus works to create animated and lively debate over the projects featured. The magazine is split into 4 different categories, each with teacher prompts which would help the teacher further the students discussions and push them creatively and to think differently.
This RSA brief was from their student design award list. Against thousands of other students this achieved runner up.
