Design education is all about problem solving. This is extremely important to teach students because in a world where everything is at your fingertips and can be looked up on the Internet in a matter of seconds, it can create a generation of students that aren't creative and don't know how to problem solve. It is important to teach students how to problem solve because it helps them become more confident in their abilities and helps them understand causality better.
“The design process follows steps that may be used sequentially or that may require the designer/student to loop back to modify an earlier stage” (Vande Zande, R. “How to implement design education in your classroom” in Design Education). These six (6) steps are Identifying a Problem, Investigate, Develop Ideas, Create Prototype, Present, and Evaluate and Revise.
For the first step, Identifying a Problem, the “problem” can either be a problem that the teacher assigns or a problem that the students come up with on their own or collaboratively, with teacher guidance. The second step, Investigate, requires students to do research on the problem; discover why it is a problem, per se. The third step and the fourth step, Develop Ideas and Create Prototype, are both for students to develop solutions to the problem and visualize those solutions. Present, the fifth step, is an essential step for the design process and design education because if a designer cannot coherently present their ideas to their teams, the ideas will never be able to come to life. Evaluate and Revise, the sixth step, is also essential to the design process and design education. Teaching students that their execution will not be perfect the first time and will always need revision is extremely important so that they will become better problem solvers and not be discouraged if their ideas do not work out perfectly the first time around.
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