Year 9 visit to the Design Museum

On Wednesday 13^th October, our Year 9 GCSE D&T students visited the Design Museum in London, to take part in a workshop as part of the museum’s flagship schools project, the ‘Design Ventura’ competition. This live design and enterprise challenge tasks students to design a new product for the Design Museum Shop, with the winning product being professionally manufactured for sale in the shop in London.

The workshop was led by designer and museum educator, Karen Jelenje, in which students explored this year’s Design Ventura brief and looked at products in the Design Museum Shop’s range, considering the different target markets to the museum and shop. This prepared students for the later part of the workshop in which students were tasked with a redesign challenge of an everyday product; students had to work in teams to develop the design of an everyday product for a specific user, considering their needs and wants. Students enjoyed being able to demonstrate their creativity and problem solving in this task and the museum educators and D&T teachers were impressed with the students’ design thinking and creativity seen in their discussions, sketches and prototyping.

Later, the students had the opportunity to deliver a short pitch of their product ideas and concepts they had generated to two industry experts to gain feedback on the feasibility of their designs and next steps for development. This was a fantastic experience for our students to develop their confidence with pitching their ideas, but also gain valuable feedback from industry experts in the fields of design and user experience.

In the last part of the day, students also got to explore the Design Museum’s ‘Designer, Maker, User’ exhibition, displaying hundreds of iconic designs from past and present, as well as visit the Design Museum shop to carry out further research and gather inspiration to bring back to the classroom to continue the creativity!

We look forward to seeing what our students produce next as they continue their work on the Design Ventura challenge back in the classroom this term; following the success of previous teams in 2019, coming third place in the competition and last year in 2020, winning ‘Most Market Ready Product’, our students are enthused to excel with this design and enterprise challenge.

Photographs below of students taking part in the workshop and exploring the museum.