Our recent book is called Taking Design Seriously in Education because design is so often undervalued within education. This follows from the fact that design is undervalued within society at large.
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:
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.
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).
In Finland, there is a long history of technical skills education being valued. The idea that design practice is a valid way of knowing is a default position within society
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.