Coopers School and Paula Henderson and Jennie Winhall

Duration: 1 day
Teacher: Dominic Nolan
Students: Year 10 Graphics

Paula Henderson is an in-house product designer at Marks & Spencer working on homewares ranges. Jennie Winhall was formally an in-house product designer at Decathlon, Europe's largest sports equipment retailer, and now works at the Design Council looking at the role of design in public services.

Activity

Paula and Jennie began with an introductory talk covering their routes into the design profession and showing some examples of their work.

The students were then given a one-day design challenge. They were asked to imagine that they were responsible for an air-drop of emergency aid and to design protective packaging, with only scrap materials to hand, that would guide fragile aid parcels of a given weight to the ground safely and ensure they were found by the intended recipients. They had until the end of the day to prototype their ideas, which would be tested in the school grounds.

Five groups were each given a large image of a particular drop location for their fragile, temperature-sensitive parcel - sea, desert, rainforest, highlands or snow. They had 30 minutes to brainstorm how their location and the likely conditions might affect their packaging, and they also had to decide what sort of people the aid was going to and why they needed it. Factors such as dangers on the ground and the need to communicate the packages' whereabouts and contents also had to be accounted for in the designs.

Each group story-boarded the dangers of their given location and drew up design specifications for their packages - 'must not roll', 'must be clearly visible', 'must deter animals' - to refer to throughout the day.

Each group was asked to develop three concepts. They planned their own work with support from Jennie, Paula and Dominic, who introduced the class to prototype modelling as an integral early part of the design process.

Prototypes made of paper, masking tape and thread, with an egg representing the contents, were tested by being launched from a third-storey fire escape. Only one didn't survive.

Feedback

Designer

Paula and Jennie were impressed with how well and how quickly each team had worked. Paula described the thinking behind the project: 'We felt that grounding it in a specific problem helped the students to define the parameters of their work much more easily, compared to the projects we had both experienced at school, which were all about redesigning an existing object in a certain style. The students' responses were much more creative as a result,' she said.

They both acknowledged the crucial role Dominic played in managing the students and felt the experience had given them a glimpse of the challenges faced by teachers: 'We realised how much energy a teacher needs to have and how the profession is all about stimulating creativity in others and bringing out each student's potential,' said Jennie.

Teacher

Dominic described the day as a very positive experience for both the students and himself: 'Working with Jennie and Paula showed that a complex problem could be tackled in a way that made the design process more enjoyable and vibrant than the model specified by GCSE syllabuses. Jennie and Paula structured the design process to make it more immediate, intuitive and natural for the students, who were able to see the physical results of their efforts much more quickly than usual. With any fear of failure absent, the students appeared uninhibited and began, uncharacteristically, to take risks, which resulted in some imaginative and original solutions.' He felt the experience had given him a wealth of ideas that he has since introduced into his teaching.