MYP Design Key Concepts in Design Notes

Key Concepts: The Widest Lens on a Design Unit

1. Every MYP design unit is built on a key concept, a big idea that reaches across every subject in the school, not just design.
2. Design draws on four of them: communication, communities, development and systems.
3. The key concept sets the widest question a unit asks, so it shapes your research at criterion A long before it shapes the product.
4. On its own a key concept is too broad to design from, so it gets narrowed by a related concept such as ergonomics or sustainability.
5. Your teacher normally picks the key concept and writes a statement of inquiry from it, but you should be able to name which concept your unit runs on and what it changes about your work.

Communication: Products That Tell You What to Do

1. Communication in design is about how information moves: from a product to its user, from you to a client, from a screen to an eye.
2. It covers signs, symbols, colour, typefaces, layout, icons, packaging and instructions.
3. A product communicates even with no words printed on it, like the one red handle on a machine that tells you which lever stops it.
4. The inquiry it opens up: how does a design tell a first time user what to do without anybody reading a manual?
5. Typical units are wayfinding signs for a new school block, a public health poster, an app welcome screen, or safety labelling on a pillar drill.
6. It pushes your testing towards comprehension checks, where you show the design to eight people and record what they think it means.

Communities: Designing for a Group You Are Not the Centre Of

1. Communities is about groups who share something: a place, an age, an interest, a language, a need.
2. The concept forces you to design for people whose habits you have to find out rather than assume.
3. The inquiry it opens up: whose needs does this product serve, and who does it quietly leave out?
4. Typical units are seating for a shared courtyard, a tool for a local allotment group, or a booking page for a village library run by volunteers.
5. It demands contact with real users, so interviews, surveys and watching people use the current setup become the backbone of criterion A.
6. It also raises conflicting needs, since a park bench that suits skateboarders rarely suits the dog walkers using the same path.

Development: Change Over Time, and What Caused It

1. Development is about how products, materials and methods change over time, and what pushed each change.
2. It looks backwards at a product's history and forwards at what the next version could do differently.
3. The inquiry it opens up: what has changed about this product in fifty years, what has stubbornly stayed the same, and why?
4. Typical units are redesigning an everyday object like a kettle, tracing bicycle frames from steel to aluminium to carbon fibre, or taking one prototype through three tested versions.
5. It suits units where you build more than once, because the improvement between version one and version two is itself the evidence.

Systems: Parts That Depend on Each Other

1. Systems treats a design as connected parts, plus the inputs and outputs that cross its edges.
2. Every system has a boundary, so part of the design work is deciding what sits inside your product and what you are leaving to somebody else.
3. The inquiry it opens up: what happens to the rest of the system when one part of it changes or breaks?
4. Typical units are a rainwater collection setup for a school garden, a classroom recycling routine, a booking site with a database behind it, or a lighting circuit driven by a light sensor.
5. Digital design leans on systems constantly, since any program is inputs, processing, storage and outputs by definition.
6. Systems units produce flowcharts and block diagrams early, because you cannot specify one part until you know what feeds it.

One Situation, Two Lenses: Canteen Food Waste

1. Start from one design situation: the school canteen bins about 15 kg of untouched food a day, most of it at the end of the second sitting.
2. Seen through communication, this is a message problem, because students cannot judge the portion size until it is already on their plate.
3. That reading leads to portion icons at the counter and a photographed serving display, then a test of whether plate returns get lighter once the labels go up.
4. Seen through systems, the same situation is a flow problem, because ordering, prep quantity, sitting times and tray return all feed each other.
5. That reading leads to a pre-order count sheet and a revised prep schedule, then a test of whether waste in kilograms falls across two weeks.
6. Same canteen, same client, two entirely different products, because the key concept decided what counted as the real problem.

Using a Key Concept Instead of Just Naming It

1. Write the key concept into your design brief so it steers the research rather than decorating the title page.
2. Turn it into two or three research questions at criterion A, so the concept actually produces data you can use.
3. Check your specification afterwards: at least one or two points should exist only because of the key concept.
4. Come back to it at criterion D when you judge impact, since that is the question the unit set out to answer.