Your Turn to Make Your Mark in Design

Do you want your pupils to be engaged with the people and world around them? Do you want to improve children’s agency and enhance their knowledge and creative and empathic skills? If your answer is yes, then design processes can be a strong approach to developing their knowledge and skill set for the 21st century. The materials on this website support teachers in guiding pupils in mastering design skills.

 

Design is a process where creative solutions are developed. When children are given an active role in the whole design process, from defining what problems need to be solved or what opportunities are to be explored, creatively exploring the solution space, deciding which ideas are worth pursuing, detailing and testing ideas, and then releasing the outcomes to society.

Children will develop creative thinking, empathy and other design skills and be able to make their mark in design; from the small-scale (the looks of a stamp) to large-scale (reducing plastic waste), in various domains such as play, education, re-use, design, architecture, transport, health care, landscaping and beyond.

This website presents a general approach for design processes with children (8-14 year olds). It is possible to use this approach in co-design processes where children cooperate with designers and parties that want input from children on real life issues. The Your Turn To make Your Mark in Design approach and tools are based upon research and originate from cases in schools, with a focus on learning outcomes for kids and design outcomes for clients. Teachers have an important role in facilitating these design processes and in the materials you will find strategies to support and scaffolding the learning process.

The Your Turn approach consists of:

  • A general approach for design processes that benefits children and clients;
  • Design tools and worksheets for learning to design;
  • Specific design projects based on the Your Turn approach and tools
  • Podcasts and you tube movies in which children explain the Your turn tools

The Your Turn approach was developed in cooperation with Mathieu Gielen, Fenne van Doorn, Maarten van Mechelen, Pieter Jan Stappers from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and a great many other partners. They also host a website ‘co-design with kids’ especially for designers, who want to involve children in their design process.

You are welcome to share the content of the Your Turn approach, with proper reference. All Your Turn materials are published under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International) licence.

For more information on our Science Education Research programme, see here: Science Education Research (tudelft.nl)