The importance of creative education

What type of learning is needed for schools to support a culture of distributed design

Daniel Charny and Dee Halligan , FixEd

Children can’t use scissors! School leavers more skilled at memorising than imagining! Student surgeons lack the manual dexterity to sew! Recent high profile anecdotes reflect a new reality, the consequence of creative, hands on subjects being sidelined in schools. In England this is evidenced by the subject Design and Technology, once the mainstay of making in schools, entering freefall, plummeting in take up by two thirds over 20 years.

Our relationship with making in education, as in life, is broken. And until recently the western world seemed generally comfortable with this trend, lost in a consumerist dream, where a never ending supply of goods could appear like magic without us lifting a finger or understanding the skills, processes or resources which go into making them.

We’re now finding, like the proverbial free lunch, this magic has come at a high cost. Arguably greater than the impact on our finite resources and our creation of emissions and waste, is the loss of knowledge, skills and cultures of making, for we lose some of the know-how to fix our problems, small and big. As societies, alongside the ability to cut and sew, saw and drill, we have lost something fundamental about the way we interact with our world and harness our creativity and ingenuity to improve it.

It’s increasingly accepted that radical change is necessary, and in the brave new world we forge, education as always will shape values, culture and mindsets as well as engaging students with knowledge and skills. In our work at FixEd in order to propose new approaches which might reinvigorate creative education we have to imagine the future society it serves. The future is always mysterious, but some things are blindingly obvious: the next generations relationship with their planet will be radically different from ours, and local production and consumption will be a critical piece of that puzzle.

Local manufacturing was once the only way. Sharing knowledge through families, guilds or traditions so obvious as to be unremarkable. Technology prompted us to break these systems and now technology reminds us and equips us to reconnect to them once more. What we could see as an irony is better seen as a correction, and as looking to the future rather than the past. Technology and tools have always been extensions of the body; the fourth industrial revolution offers new opportunities to bring them home and renegotiate the control and benefit.

At first glance our flagship learning programme, Fixperts, looks unconnected to these ideas. Teams of Fixperts develop their creative problem solving skills through a human-centred process; they’ve worked on problems from putting in earrings to opening doors, and made anything from cycling to sleeping easier. Encouraging a DIY, hands-on ethos and responding to need with creativity and resourcefulness is heartwarming, but Fixperts’ agenda is way bigger: these students are engaging at micro-scale with global issues like ageing, waste and accessibility, working collaboratively and sharing their ideas openly and harnessing the newly available tools of the fourth industrial revolution to do so. Without these contexts it it would be a nice project, instead it is quietly revolutionary. Fixperts is a conversation with a changing world, questioning the conventions of design, authorship and ownership, production and distribution.

Fixperts is one of many learning initiatives seeking to challenge current education agendas and test ideas about what cultures and attitudes, knowledge and skills will be needed to serve our improved future (see for example Mouse or Girls Garage in the US, the Waag and Institute of Imagination in Europe, and systemic change experiments in Finland and Singapore). Change happens slowly in education and these kinds of inspiring and pioneering initiatives are desperately needed to test new ideas and approaches, inform the future mainstream and help shift the paradigm. What’s also needed are the big ideas which education will support.

Distributed Design is one such big idea, Fab City another; both require us to question our ideas about how the world can or should work and rethink the systems we take for granted. It’s a mammoth task to redesign systems at scale; the creative, resourceful and brave citizens, and the enlightened culture critical to securing these big ideas can only be anchored in learning.

Fixperts is a learning programme run by not for profit think and do tank FixEd. It has been taught in 20 countries, and in over 40 higher education institutes. In the academic year 2018-2019 over 200 school level teachers in the UK were trained in the Fixperts approach.