However, in some places this doesn’t hold. In Finland, design is valued both within society and within education. That is a theme from Chapter 5 in the book, and the aim here is to share some of those ideas.

A good place to start is by rehearsing one of the core arguments from the book:

1. We are looking towards a world in which all students have opportunities to develop design capabilities during their schooling. Design capabilities need be elevated, ideally to the status of literacy and numeracy and considered as an essential part of a quality education. They are for everyone; they are not simply ‘nice to have if you want to be a professional designer’. Currently, Design is relegated (seen as less important than subjects like Science) and subsumed (tacked on as a part of, say, a Technologies or Engineering subject). That needs to change.

2. The value of design within schools and within society are interrelated. Chapter 5 in the book uses a systems mapping approach to show the complexity of why this is true and how it plays out.

   Elevating the status of design in a society is not simple, it requires a shift in the social imagination of what we mean when we say “design”.

Käsityö: Design and Craft in Finland

Design is compulsory in schooling in Finland under the name of Käsityö, which translates as ‘Craft’. In Finland, Craft has been a compulsory subject for about ~150 years. For most of this history it has been highly valued as the place where students learn life skills like woodwork and textile-work.

Crucially, Käsityö (as part of the educational sloyd tradition) has long been taught with an explicit awareness that students learn transferable capabilities alongside technical craft skills. Through (say) woodwork, students can develop motor skills, moral training, problem solving skills, and much more (Whittaker, 2013).

The long history of Craft education is vital for understanding why Design has an elevated status in Finland and other Scandinavian countries.

As advanced technologies continued to be developed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, there was already a widespread social understanding that this subject of Craft really mattered. It was the place where students learned technical skills and how to use them to solve problems as an important part of a student’s development as an adult. Design fit in here and so did technologies, and the relationship between them was understood.

It should be noted that debates still rage within Finland about Craft education, what it means, and what it should be teaching (Kokko et al, 2020).

Juxtaposition with Australia and the UK

In Finland, generations upon generations have had Craft as a mandatory subject. They have internalised the idea that design practice is an important form of knowing. Some form of understanding and valuing of design is the default position within society, built up over time, and there is a culture of design pedagogy.

In Australia and the UK the traditions are different. The relationship between technology and design is still being grappled with in both nations and is perhaps given away by the fact that the subject name in each simply mashes those words together with a conjunction: Design and Technologies in Australia and Design and Technology in the UK.

We could characterise the social imaginary around Technology as, arguably, ‘learning how to use these new fangled digital things’. Similarly, the social imaginary around Design as ‘learning how to be an architect or a graphic designer’. The conjunction of the two is confused. What do the parents of students make of this subject? They certainly didn’t experience it themselves as students.

Why Craft in Finland matters

The Finnish example of Craft is useful if we want to understand how schools in Australia or the UK might start to take Design more seriously. It shows the value of having traditions of designerly education and of cycles. Teachers who learned and learned to value design pedagogy from experienced design teachers, and parents who learned the value of design education from experiencing it.

In Australia, we’re still developing all of this. It’s natural that it takes a while to get the flywheel going, but the actions that are taken by schools, school systems, and governments can either speed up or delay us getting there. Having an awareness of how these systemic factors fit together, and the need to synchronise them, is critical. This applies at a school leadership level and at a state and national policy level.

Finland, along with other Scandinavian countries, is useful as positive example of the claim we make in the book, that:

With all of these factors (i.e., long history, strong curriculum, high social value, widespread teacher knowledge), it is then natural for Design (Craft) to be taken seriously by policymakers and educational leaders (Kelly & Ness Wilson, 2026).

References

• Kelly, N. & Ness Wilson, L. (2026). Taking Design Seriously in Education. Elements in Critical Issues in Teacher Education. Cambridge University Press.

• Kokko, S., Kouhia, A., & Kangas, K. (2020). Finnish craft education in turbulence: Conflicting debates on the current National Core Curriculum. Techne Serien-Forskning i Slöjdpedagogik Och Slöjdvetenskap, 27(1), 1–19.

• Porko-Hudd, M., Pöllänen, S., & Lindfors, E. (2018). Common and holistic crafts education in Finland.

• Whittaker, D. J. (2013). The establishment of educational sloyd in Finland. In The Impact and Legacy of Educational Sloyd (pp. 149–174). Routledge.

The book changed my life. I was a bit lost at the time. Involved in activism but too pragmatic to give myself to any particular cause. Doing a PhD but feeling like academia was too removed from the causes that I cared about. Reading Horton and Freire I had a feeling of shock and realisation: so this is what education should have been about… My own schooling looked nothing like what they were describing. Instead of developing agency, I had learned to follow recipes and fill out assessments with the answers that I knew examiners were looking for.

I’ve spent over twenty years working on this problem. On the one hand, studying what it means to become an expert in design. On the other hand, studying how school systems function in Australia, how to work with them, and how to support teachers better. Where it all connects is that “design capabilities” are precise and effective way of understanding what it means to have agency in a post-neoliberal, AI-powered world.

Our book Taking Design Seriously in Education tries to weave all of this together. It takes the position that all students need to learn transferable design skills. Design is for everyone, not just those who want to become professional designers.

Most importantly, it makes the case for why design subjects (in Australian schools this is Design & Technologies) are just as important as mathematics, science, or English. Design should be resourced accordingly, with attention given to initial teacher education for design, national testing for design (done the right way!), and funding to support better outcomes.

The aim in writing the book is to support this bigger goal of improving the quality of Design education in Australia. We’re currently working on how to support Design teachers better (if you’re in Queensland, we’d love you to come to our upcoming PD and book launch held on September 17th, 2026). We’re also working with principals, independent schools, and state governments.

We’d love to hear from you if you have ideas about how to further this agenda and we look forward to releasing the book in coming months.

References

Cross, N. (2018). Expertise in Professional Design. In The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (Vol. 372). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316480748.021

Kelly, N., Ness Wilson, L. & Huck, V. (In press). Taking Design Seriously in Education, Cambridge University Press, UK

Last week, I sat down with Stephen Andersen, to talk about next weeks Design and Technologies Teacher Association Conference. Stephen who is such a good host, and also happens to be the Treasurer of DATTA QLD. The chat was part of the series Stephen is doing warming us all up for next weeks DATTA Conference, where I’m going to be busy presenting 3 sessions!

• Why Design is the most important subject in school (with )

• The Future of Trades: Connecting Design and Technologies classrooms to real-world manufacturing pathways (with Manufacturing Skills Queensland (MSQ)) and

• Pedagogical Enactments of Design and Technologies: a research informed framework for teaching aligned to the Australian curriculum (drawn from my PhD thesis).

If you’d like more context before the conference, Stephen and I also recorded an extended conversation in early 2025, covering my research into Design and Technologies and ITE, and our shared history in a little town called Nanango.

Thanks Stephen - your work championing Queensland Design and Technologies teachers through DATTA and the podcast is seriously valued!

Yet its aim was just to whet the appetite of attendees of the conference, where the title of our presentation will be “Why Design is the Most Important Subject in School” (Nick Kelly and Leighann Ness Wilson) and it’s a deliberate provocation. As in, why isn’t design taken as seriously as other subjects like Science or English or Mathematics? And how might things change?

Listen to the podcast at https://pca.st/8mfbcz69

I’d been invited to not just present, but to give the keynote address at the conference dinner! What an absolute honour, to then, a few weeks later, speak to a room full of people who care deeply about Design and Technologies education. I used the opportunity to highlight all the potential of our subject, share my research and enthusiasm, and also say some things I felt need to be said.

The talk drew on my research as well as honest reflections on the state of the field of Design and Technologies education. I spoke about the genuine potential I see in Design and Technologies, but also the concerns I have, particularly around initial teacher education, and the broader confusion around how our subject is perceived.

By this time I had begun collaborating more seriously with Associate Professor Nick Kelly. We had shifted from bouncing shared ideas, to drafting the manuscript for a book.

Nick was there in full support as I delivered my Keynote: Contemporary Research into Design and Technologies Education: Insights, Implications and Future Directions.

Watch the full keynote on my website createed.com.au

Fast forward a year, and I feel so privileged to share that, together with my co-authors, Nick and Vaughan Huck - who bought it to life with her illustrations, our book: Taking Design Seriously in Education comes out through Cambridge University Press in August 2026. We can’t wait to share it with the community.

This year, Nick and I are heading back to the DATTA Queensland Conference, this time to present a session inspired by the book: Why Design is the Most Important Subject in School. I also have two other presentations at the conference, which you can check out in the program below. If you’re in Brisbane on 18–19 June, we’d love to see you there.

DATTA Queensland 2026 program

Event registration

The core argument of the talk is that skills like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication are still in the background of K-12 schooling when, in the era of AI, they ought to be front and center as the most important thing. These four things are known as 21st century skills and they’ve been talked about for decades.

Design should be the subject where these skills get taught, but design isn’t taken seriously in schools in most countries in the world. It ought to be. Design often gets relegated to the background compared to the weighty subjects like English, mathematics, and science.

There are good reasons why schools haven’t adapted to teach 21st century skills well. There are systemic factors at play. The whole point of the designerly schools movement is to build the momentum needed to change this.

My colleague, Leighann Ness Wilson, was in the audience on the day I gave this TEDxQUT talk. She was doing her own work with a similar focus at the time and our conversations over the course of a year became the book that will be out in August of 2026, Taking Design Seriously in Education (Cambridge University Press).

The book starts with the personal, describing the significant influence that a book had on my life. The book is called We Make the Road by Walking, by the educators Myles Horton and Paulo Freire.

Becoming a capable designer is gives you agency in the world. Imagine a school system in which curriculum, the built environment, the assessment regime, and the pedagogy all supported students in becoming capable designers. It’s already starting to happen.

Kelly, Ness Wilson and Huck, 2026

Illustration: "The Expert Designer" by Vaughan Huck, 2025, CC-BY-ND 4.0