DESIGN ABACUS

Exploring ideas and the task Generating ideas Y9

 Draw up a design specification for the product detailing the design criteria which reflect a user’s needs

Generating ideas

 Analyse how existing products are designed and made in order to provide a range of strategies and factual information to use when designing their own products

 Be prepared to take risks when generating ideas through a range of creative and critical thinking techniques

40 minutes

The ‘Design abacus’ (Handout 1) is a versatile design tool that can be used to evaluate the sustainability performance (environmental, social and economic) of a current product or design idea.

 Each pupil/group needs a ‘Design abacus’ sheet, a set of questions (‘Design abacus’ handout 2) and a product design idea to evaluate.

 To assess a product (or design idea), pupils work through the questions. For each batch of questions (environmental, social and economic), they give the product a sustainability rating on a five-point scale (–2, –1, 0, +1, +2). Then they plot findings on the ‘Design abacus’. The positive scores are awarded for good characteristics and the negative scores for poor characteristics. It is a relative score, so accuracy is not needed.

 Pupils assess each criterion; they should also assess how confident they are in their rating. They might just guess, in which case their confidence would be low.

 Pupils should continue to address the issues along the chart. When the chart is completed, a line should then be drawn to connect the scores.

 This should give a visual impression of the good and bad characteristics of a product.

 Pupils could look together at criteria with low confidence levels, and discuss how they could find additional information to enable them to make a more confident judgement.

 The targets for redesign of a product could then either be drawn on the abacus or written as a design specification.

 Pupils could return to the abacus at various stages of their product’s development, to evaluate its sustainability performance.

Other uses of ‘Design abacus’ in Years 7, 8 and 9

 Compare two or three products against the same criteria, using a different coloured pencil for each product assessed.

 The abacus could be used to evaluate the whole or part of a product’s life cycle, to help make decisions on choice of materials and production methods. For these activities, generate some appropriate criteria for pupils and let them complete the criteria on the blank abacus (Handout 3).

This activity was originally developed by Loughborough University