Critical thinking is more important than literacy or numeracy.

 TT: Why do you think that design is more important than literacy or numeracy?

DW: To my way of thinking, literacy and numeracy are really tools to be applied to make our thoughts coherent, understandable and precisely transferrable between two people. Design, however, is a fundamental way of thinking, integrating many widely disparate concepts from the functional (usually quantifiable) to the beautiful (usually unquantifiable feelings), sorting the good from the bad to find an acceptable solution from an incoherent mass of facts, circumstances and value statements. The process of designing is a highly complex balancing act involving feelings. It may or may not use and words or numbers. Design thinking by consumers requires us to compare and evaluate facts with feelings, science with art, accepting or rejecting alternatives throughout our conscious lives and indeed our subconscious mind often works well during our sleeping hours. Design is a powerful conceptual filter that has been grossly misunderstood by educators for far too long – but it does not supplant literacy and numeracy, they all co-exist for our benefit.

TT: What do you mean when you say that design is a verb as well as a noun?

DW: Noun; our education system tends to imply ART as a finished product or even as the icing on the cake. Verb – the process of designing as mentioned above. It is the primary thinking about the making of the cake.

TT: Can you expand on the notion that architecture is ‘no use without furniture’?

DW: Imagine your house as a bare shell without any fittings or furniture. Even if the house structure provided a perfectly controlled internal environment it would still be physically uncomfortable, acoustically unacceptable and there would be no softness to ensure livability, cushioning the human frame from the literal hardness of the practical house structure (architecture)

TT: You say the general public has no design lexicon and that design should be woven into the school curriculum. How?

DW: This is where design as a verb comes into play. Life is a constant balancing act (see above) – “do I do this or that?” and the questions that require evaluation are relative to age and interests, getting more complex with gained knowledge. Personal value systems need to be developed, especially in relation to how our environment is being degraded because of population growth, large scale migration, resource depletion and pollution of the environment – and the urgent need for encouraging renewable energies. Some of this is being done in schools but I am not sure how it is being integrated throughout the curriculum.

The rapid growth of technology increasingly requires all consumers to be critically aware of our needs and wants in relation to their consequences on our planet. This awareness comes from many sources, but critical thinking and doing remain better embedded in the human brain compared to teacher delivered knowledge.

The top-down secondary school curriculum should be turned on its head – teachers should become “thinking facilitators” using design thinking as a core discipline which is a critical concept for the wellbeing of our world and should be integral to every ‘subject’ area. I should stress that the aim is not to produce future designers – we urgently need aware consumers in society who can recognise good from bad.