The Chilean school curriculum shares with the design literacy approach the goal of forming responsible citizens committed to caring for the environment. Given that design is included as obligatory content of the visual arts and technology subjects in the first 10 years of compulsory education, we wonder if the learning objectives of visual arts and technology support the development of design literacy abilities, as outlined by Lutnæs and Cross. To address this question, we coded 119 learning objectives in alignment with Lutnæs’s and Cross’s design literacy abilities. Then, we generated heatmaps to undertake a visual analysis of the alignment between the learning objectives and design literacy categories. As a result, we found a strong convergence between the Cross and Lutnæs categories and technology learning objectives, especially in lower secondary level education. In the visual arts, design was focused on aesthetics, and connections with design literacy narratives were scarce. We propose that adopting the analytical instrument (coding table) as a standardised tool will encourage comparable studies of how well design literacy is incorporated into other national curricula.

We argue that visual representations of design processes contribute toward social and material practices of design(ing). They are used as didactic devices. We will discuss them using metaphors to illustrate that they are active material devices of which circulation, production and consumption are informed and informing perceived complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes associated with design. We propose a follow-up study to investigate how teachers and designers use and interpret visual design process models. The reason is to identify how these models are informing what design is as we are interested to understand how these models are contributing to the development of Design Literacies.

Desde hace algún tiempo podemos observar una transición desde iniciativas estatales orientadas a fomentar la difusión del diseño chileno, hacia iniciativas que fomentan su aplicación en diversos sectores de la vida social, con el propósito de generar beneficios sociales o económicos. Por ello cabe preguntarse cuál es el rol que el Estado chileno asigna al diseño en la sociedad que aspira construir y cuán alineados están los planes de estudios con estos requerimientos. A casi cincuenta años de su cierre, es necesario redescubrir la HfG-Ulm para entender los principios con los que desarrolló un modelo educativo que se distanciaba de las escuelas de artes y oficios, para responder a la reconstrucción moral y material del país. Este trabajo busca analizar esta propuesta pedagógica como forma de entender el diseño y su inserción en el tejido social. La reflexión cobra vigencia porque si bien el Estado chileno ha ido incorporando al diseño en distintas iniciativas, todavía está en construcción una visión integrada de lo que el diseño es y puede llegar a-hacer por el país. Por otra parte, la pregunta acerca del propósito de la formación disciplinar dista de estar resuelta y generar consenso.

Knowledge and skills are tightly entangled with economic and political power. In past agricultural societies, most of the population required skills such as animal husbandry for food and sewing clothing to keep warm. Centuries later, with the advent of an economy centred on the extraction of natural resources and the production of consumer goods, it was necessary to develop more complex skills that enabled people to integrate into emerging societies. School systems were responsible for initiating this process through the ‘literacy’ of the child population. They provided the content and conditions for children to develop the skills needed to read, understand and produce written texts. This approach, albeit with some nuances, was the predominant perspective until the second half of the twentieth century, when new understandings of literacy emerged due to rapid technological advances and critical perspectives that questioned the role of the school in reproducing social relations of power and control (Arredondo & Corzo, 2017; Southwell, 2013).

I met Liv Merete Nielsen at the DRS Limerick 2018 conference. I was studying Chilean teachers' use of design methods to solve pedagogical problems supported by a British Council fund. Peter Lloyd and Derek Jones brought the experience and vision of The Open University's Design Thinking course. They had Nigel Cross as an unavoidable theoretical reference. I also knew Maureen Carroll and Shelley Goldman's work at Stanford University to promote STEM disciplines in vulnerable schools in Palo Alto. Maureen and Shelley built on the IDEO-d.School universe and had Tim Brown and David Kelly as key references.