A teacher at the Old Palace School for Girls has interpreted designing for the future in an interesting way. He adapted the activity DF1 ‘Just how much has our society changed?’ In this pupils identify which products and services have become available over the past 25 years. The teacher then asked his pupils to imagine they were teenagers 25 years ago. They had to think about how they would have used their leisure time and whether they would have liked it compared to their life today. This gave the pupils a very concrete means of considering the way technology impacts on our lives.

The teacher used the activity DF2 ‘The same thing then and now – what’s changed?’ He provided visual information about mobile phones and asked his pupils to tackle two tasks. First to present a piece of writing which describes the ways in which the mobile telephone has developed since the early models. He provided a list of headings to help their thinking – appearance, style, who might own the product, how it operates, what different features and functions it has, size and weight and how useful it is. This gave the pupils a structure that enabled them to identify trends in the way the mobile telephone has changed. Then he asked them to produce at least one annotated sketch of a future mobile communications product bearing in mind how they had changed in the past.

The teacher used the TV programme ‘Materials Technology – the future of’ as the main stimulus for designing for the future. The girls were fascinated by memory metal and used this as the basis for their designs. The products conceived covered a wide range including self-repair car body panels, hair styling, glamourous nails, adjusting duvets, crinkle free paper, self-opening/closing windows, long life tooth brushes and flat strip thermometers.

(Abridged version)