James Dyson: Failure is interesting

The early prototype for the new D&T curriculum may not have been a success, but learning from your mistakes is the mark of a good design engineer, says Sir James Dyson...

Any design engineer at Dyson will tell you it was Mechano, LEGO or building dens in the forest that first sparked his or her passion for making things, and unlocked an underlying engineering potential in the process.

When I was at school I was consigned to woodwork, which meant building desks, clocks and bookends – ultimately uninspiring and not challenging enough. I was then given a choice between science and art and found my way to studying furniture design. It was only much later that I fell into design engineering… and everything clicked into place.

So when Michael Gove approached me to feed in to the National Curriculum for design and technology, I jumped at the chance. The engineering deficit bites hard on the UK economy, but we can do something about it – provide a high quality D&T education as early as possible. Writing a curriculum is, in itself, an iterative design process. And when the first draft of the curriculum emerged in March it was clear we had many prototypes to go: bicycle maintenance, flower arranging and how to cook a syrup sponge had been brought to the fore in a subject that should be about problem solving and new technologies. It was not what we needed to inspire the next generation of design engineers.

My Foundation met with the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Design and Technology Association and others to write an industry relevant, stretching programme of study. This was presented to the Department for Education and our recommendations were accepted. As a result, D&T will now be the forum for sparky kids to use their science and maths knowledge to make real things.

In many schools, design and technology has become confused. A lack of resources and time has led to generations of children being tasked with making steady hand games and keyrings. Children receive a narrow brief and the only design decision is which colour of paint to use.

The process of ‘design, make, evaluate’ is clearly defined within the new programme of study, which has iterative design at its heart. This not only mimics the process used in industry but offers an important lesson. Children are growing up afraid of failure – but failure is interesting. When things go wrong you dig out the problem and start again. Our children will soon find that the design process is not linear. I made 5,127 prototypes of my bagless vacuum cleaner before I got it right. That’s 5,126 failures. Design engineering is about using new technologies to solve everyday problems. One of our key recommendations was for students to be given live briefs, grounded in real-world problems: the ageing population, sustainable power, the housing shortage. By combining this autonomy with their creativity, children dream up numerous and varied outcomes.

They’ll learn there is no correct answer and be given the chance to compare and contrast their work. Pupils will take what they have learnt in art, maths, science and apply this to the issues they come across in the classroom. It’s hands on. Young people are entering the workplace ill equipped for the job at hand and industry bosses lament the emerging skills gap. But things will change if our schools allow high-tech machinery to creep into their classrooms. By the time our primary school children are of working age, they will be as au fait with churning out 3D printed prototypes as we are with printing documents from our computer. Our schools have the potential to be the most forward looking in the world – and this isn’t a call to thrust an iPad into every child’s hands.

The design engineers of the future might be sitting in your classroom. I hope the content of the new curriculum will arm them with the tools they need to take bright ideas out of their heads and into their hands.