Reasons to be making: the role of making in design education

The Peter Dormer Lecture is the UK's major annual applied arts lecture. For the 2014 lecture the designer, curator and educator Daniel Charny focused on an activity currently in the limelight: making. Drawing on his 25 years of experience in design and design education, and his work with makers in exhibitions such as the V&A's seminal Power of Making (2011), Charny reflected on the role of making in design education. In particular, he focused on the central role that making plays in the design process, informing decisions and outcomes otherwise impossible, and considered how making brings together imagination and skill, two qualities vital to the energy of contemporary practice. Charny also touched on today's making communities, the relationship with making in education environments being transformed by the digital, and ultimately what lies behind the current drive of making activity.