Making design more meaningful

Being my first post for the new year, of both the Islamic and Gregorian calendars, I would like to kick start the year by going back to the basics of design...about how one can make design, or the design experience, a more meaningful one. And I say this within the context of someone who is teaching design to a class of early teens, who might not really see the depth of design, but is somehow or rather very much aware about the aesthetics and specifications of the products that they have, and have this equivocal view about these 'designerly' things that perhaps adults like myself feels so duh!

For this year, I would love to see and implement something that will make design more meaningful...perhaps more humbling in its experience and eventuality, perhaps even more inclusive in nature to those around the designers...not something that is exclusive, and definitely not something that is just superficial in nature. Perhaps something that will rock the senses, and bring forth our intellectual capacity to question and even tickling our innate 'design quotient' or design intelligence, and perhaps even bring us forth to design nirvana, albeit momentarily!

And as I was reflecting through my programs for the new set up that I will be part of in the middle of the year, the thing that is niggling positively in my mind is on how we move away from design topics that can quite passe at times, to sort of like maintain the program's freshness, whilst at the same time also providing my future design charges with the necessary rigours that will enable them to appreciate all the rudiments of Art, Design, Media and Technology, the field that I will head up after June. It was quite insightful for me to review through some ideas for these, but at times it is never easy or worse still, not one iota of thought came into being. But I do hope as I firm up some of these ideas, though untested, it is still going to be something that is different...but not necessarily different for the sake of just being different, but more so, being differentiated from the crowd so that we can set the tone, the pace, and the depth of how design education ought to move on.