These are ATARMAxxing’s course-guide summaries. Review all required areas, including school assessments, practical work, performances or folios where applicable. Follow your course’s option rules.
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Unit 1: Stakeholder-centred design
Unit 1 sets up the discipline. You learn that designers work for other people, and you compare formal models of the design process, including the double diamond, Design Thinking for Educators, the Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, the Stanford d.school model and Design Minds, noticing that each alternates between opening options up and narrowing them down. You separate simple tame problems, which have a knowable solution, from complex wicked problems, which do not, and practise writing design criteria from stakeholder needs and wants rather than from your own taste. The principles of good design, innovative, useful, aesthetic, accessible and sustainable, give you a vocabulary for judging work, while a survey of Art Deco, Bauhaus, Brutalism, Memphis, Minimalism, Modernism and Postmodernism gives you precedents to reference. Underneath sit the elements and principles of design and the drawing skills you will use in every later unit: ideation sketching, schematic sketching and low-fidelity prototyping.
Unit 2: Commercial design influences
Unit 2 introduces the client, and with the client a set of constraints an independent designer does not get to ignore. You examine what the client actually controls, such as the brief, the budget, the brand and the timeline, and how that differs from the stakeholder whose needs the product has to meet. Economic, social and cultural influences on commercial design get unpacked in turn: market position and price point, shifting social expectations, and cultural meaning that makes the same form read differently to different audiences. You practise collaborative design approaches, defining a commercial design problem and its criteria with other people, then devise and refine ideas by moving deliberately between divergent thinking, which generates breadth, and convergent thinking, which tests and eliminates. The unit ends on communication: presenting concepts to an audience who need to be convinced, not merely shown.
Unit 3: Human-centred design
Unit 3 is human-centred design, and it starts with people rather than products. You study human attitudes, expectations, motivations and experiences through frameworks such as the four pleasures, physio, socio, psycho and ideo, and the attract, converse and transact model of how someone moves through an interaction. Ergonomics and anthropometric data supply the hard side: clearance, reach and adjustability, and why designing to a percentile range rather than to an average matters. The designing-with-empathy techniques are practical, covering structured observation, interviews and experiencing the task yourself, and are consolidated in empathy maps that separate what a person says, thinks, does and feels. From that evidence you define a design problem and criteria that trace back to stated stakeholder requirements, devise ideas through divergent thinking, sketching and low-fidelity prototyping, then evaluate and refine convergently against stakeholder feedback before proposing a communicated concept.
Unit 4: Sustainable design influences
Unit 4 is the externally assessed unit. You begin with where opportunities come from, whether a gap in an existing market, an entirely new market, or a chance to improve wellbeing, then work through the three strands of sustainability, economic, social and ecological, which frequently pull against each other. The design life cycle, from launch through growth and maturity to decline, explains why products get replaced, and sets up the contrast between linear design, which ends in disposal, and circular design, which keeps materials in use. The circular strategies are the tools you will actually argue with: product as a service, product life extension, closed loop and take-back systems, and modularity. Planned obsolescence is examined as a set of design decisions rather than a conspiracy. You then define sustainable design problems, stakeholders, constraints and criteria, and devise, refine and communicate concepts.
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These links come from this subject’s existing official-paper archive. A listed year is the document’s year, not a claim that it matches the 2026 course. Written papers may cover only part of your assessment; use the official requirements for practical, performance and folio components.
QCAA Design 2025 v1.3 General Senior Syllabus (Units 3 and 4 from the 2026 external assessment cohort; the 2019 v1.2 syllabus was examined 2020 to 2025)
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Check current requirements and course options: https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/senior/senior-subjects/syllabuses/technologies/design