National Year 11 Design and Technology
Chapters: 2
1. 3.3 Designing and making principles
3.3.1 Investigation, primary and secondary data · 3.3.2 Environmental, social and economic challenge · 3.3.3 The work of others · 3.3.4 Design strategies · 3.3.5 Communication of design ideas · 3.3.6 Prototype development · 3.3.7 Selection of materials and components · 3.3.8 Tolerances · 3.3.9 Material management · 3.3.10 Specialist tools and equipment · 3.3.11 Specialist techniques and processes
- The Design Process: From Problem to Product – The design process is a loop of steps designers use to solve a real problem for real people: investigate the need, define it in a brief and a measurable specification, generate many ideas, build a prototype, then test and evaluate it against the specification. Whatever fails sends you back round the loop. This repeating is called iteration, and it is how almost every product, app, building and artwork is improved.
- Sustainable Design: Products That Are Kind to People and Planet – Sustainable design means making products that meet our needs while harming nature and people as little as possible. Every product has a life cycle: materials, making, transport, use and end of life. A life cycle assessment adds up the ecological footprint (energy, CO₂, water, waste) at each stage. The social footprint is the effect on workers and communities: pay, safety, child labour, fair trade. Designers use the six Rs (rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle), design for maintenance, repair and disassembly, and avoid planned obsolescence. Ecodesign also weighs the economic side: a product must be affordable and profitable, so the best designs balance environment, society and economy.
- Design History: How Movements and Designers Shaped Everyday Things – Designs change over time because of new materials, new technology and new ideas about people and society. Arts and Crafts rejected cheap factory goods and valued hand-made work. Art Nouveau used flowing curves from nature. Bauhaus and Modernism said form follows function and designed for mass production. Mid-century designers used moulded plywood and plastic for affordable furniture. Postmodernism and Memphis broke the rules with colour and fun. Today's designers focus on sustainability and digital making. Studying the work of others helps us analyse, get inspired and design better.
- Design Thinking: Solving Problems by Starting with People – Design thinking is a way to solve problems by first understanding the people who have them. It has five stages: empathise (watch and listen to users, using tools like an empathy map), define (write a clear problem as a 'How might we…?' question), ideate (create many ideas, including from nature: biomimicry), prototype (make quick, cheap models) and test (try them with users and improve). It is iterative and user-centred, and it opens up and narrows down twice, like a double diamond.
- Technical Drawing: Communicating Design Ideas – Technical drawing is a shared visual language for showing the exact shape and size of an object. Designers start with freehand sketches, then use pictorial views (isometric, oblique) to show the object in 3D, and orthographic projection (front, top and side views) with standard lines, dimensions in millimetres and a scale so that anyone can make it. Today most drawings are made with CAD software.
- Materials and Their Properties: Why Things Are Made of What They Are – Every product is made from materials chosen for their properties. The main families are papers and boards, timbers, metals, polymers (plastics) and textiles. Physical properties describe what a material is like (density, conductivity, how it reacts to heat and water). Working properties describe how it behaves when we use or shape it (strength, hardness, toughness, elasticity, plasticity, malleability, ductility). Materials come from natural sources such as trees, ores and crude oil, and are sold in standard stock forms like sheets, bars, tubes and planks. A designer picks a material by matching its properties to the job, and also thinks about cost, availability, looks and the environment.
- Production Methods – Firms choose how to make things by how many they need. One-off (job) production makes a single item to order; batch production makes a set of identical items, then switches; mass (flow) production makes huge numbers on a line; continuous production runs non-stop. Lean production and just-in-time cut waste and stock. Quality control checks products against a target size with a tolerance (for example 50 ± 0.5 mm), and quality assurance builds quality into every stage.
2. Non-exam assessment
Contextual challenge design-and-make project
- The Design Process: From Problem to Product – The design process is a loop of steps designers use to solve a real problem for real people: investigate the need, define it in a brief and a measurable specification, generate many ideas, build a prototype, then test and evaluate it against the specification. Whatever fails sends you back round the loop. This repeating is called iteration, and it is how almost every product, app, building and artwork is improved.