The year was 2007. I was halfway through a PhD using neural networks to study how designers construct interpretations. I was in a bookshop in the USA and a book jumped out at me, We Make the Road by Walking, a beautiful book that is a dialogue between two great educators, Myles Horton and Paulo Freire. In it, they describe how education should function as a way for people to develop agency to do the things that matter to them in the world.
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.
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.
Schooling is about helping students to develop tools for life. Transferable design capabilities (like knowing how to reason with a problem, devise activities, and take actions to learn what is needed and to iterate on ideas) are the most important of those tools.
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