Excitement and motivation: doing what you like doing best and getting rewarded for it!

Design and technology is a popular subject because it gives you the opportunity to:

• succeed in creating something that did not exist before
• solve real problems that somebody has met, making their life easier or happier
• do your own thing, following your interests and getting a qualification in the process!
• produce hard evidence of what you can do, which can convince possible employers or tutors in further or higher education that you are just the person they are looking for.

As well as all that, you also have something to be proud of which can stimulate you to even greater achievements!

What are your interests?

Because design and technology is such an individual activity, what you do in it depends very largely on you! Your teachers can help you with the basic skills and principles. They can lead you through some start-up projects and they can help you find resources of materials, equipment and professional advice. They can encourage you to find, and build on, your interests and they may be able to help you find suitable problems to solve, but it is up to you to sort out your real practical interests, and this may not be as easy as it sounds as there are so many possible starting points.

Possible starting points

It may be that your interests lie in particular materials such as wood and metal. From this starting point, you can look at what you can do with those materials, such as designing and making furniture, decorative sculpture, etc. but your interests may arise from music, cycling, flying, swimming, surfing, skateboarding, robotics, toys, or whatever! Then again, it may be that engineering, product design or furniture design is what switches you on.

Other interests such as photography, astronomy, athletics, body-building, or the theatre may point you in the direction of supportive equipment.

The projects included on this web site may give you some ideas.

There is virtually no field of human activity and interest which does not need the support of design and technology in one form or another.

Teachers are, obviously, sources of ideas and inspiration, especially in the fields of their own interests, but they can also put you in touch with organisations outside the school which want to support design and technology.

You too can make contact outside school, in a garage, a hospital, a careers centre, a museum, a visitors centre, etc. Any of these are likely to need something to be designed and made which will help them in their work.

The creative discipline of design and technology

Whatever your personal interests, design and technology is a subject with a creative discipline around which any course must be constructed. This web site is designed to help you ensure that your course is on track:

• to build on your interests
• to see that your projects progressively become more real
• to help you produce evidence of your grasp of the discipline.

How this web site works

It is hoped that you will find this site fun to use and that it will lead you into unexplored territory, giving you new slants on familiar scenes, and creating new visions and identifying new purposes for other subjects you are studying, particularly in the sciences and the arts.

It is obviously impossible for this site to give you the answers to all the questions and decisions you will face. What it can do is to prompt you with ideas in the various parts of the discipline of design and technology, especially those that you will need to show that you understand, and why you have chosen one idea rather than another to help you reach your decisions.

You should always remember that design and technology is an extremely flexible subject, with a vast potential syllabus from which you can chose those bits to call your own for your particular project. It is not what you know that counts so much as how you choose what to know, and how you use it in the decision-making processes of your design and technology project.