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)
Design is assessed through internal assessments completed at school across Units 3 and 4, the Unit 3 instrument being the design challenge, plus a QCAA external assessment worth 25 per cent. The external assessment is an examination in extended response format: a single question with stimulus, set on Unit 4 subject matter and answered in both visual and written mode, with 15 minutes of planning time before 120 minutes of working time. QCAA releases a stimulus book, a question and response book and a marking guide each year, alongside an annual subject report.
Past papers on this subject span more than one syllabus. Papers written under an older one still work as practice, but the units and topics they test have changed — the index labels every paper with the syllabus it was set under.
Design 2019 v1.2 General senior syllabus · 2019 (Units 1-2 implementation) / 2020 (Units 3-4, first EA cohort)–2025 (last EA cohort under this syllabus)Design 2025 v1.3 General senior syllabus · 2025 (Units 1-2 implementation) / 2026 (Units 3-4, first EA cohort)–current
The units and topics, one by one
Each area below lists the concepts named in the syllabus, what the QCAA exam asks of them, and the mistake that most often costs marks.
Area 1 of 4
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.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 9 points
- Topic 1: Designing for others
- The design profession and models of the design process (double diamond, Design Thinking for Educators, Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, Stanford d.school, Design Minds)
- Balancing competing aesthetic, cultural, economic, social and technical features
- Simple ('tame') vs complex ('wicked') design problems
- Stakeholders, needs/wants and defining design problems and constraints
- Design criteria and the principles of good design (innovative, useful, aesthetic, accessible, sustainable)
- Influential design styles and designers of the past (Art Deco, Bauhaus, Brutalism, Memphis, Minimalism, Modernism, Postmodernism)
- Elements and principles of design (space, line, colour, shape, texture, tone, form, proportion, scale; balance, contrast, proximity, harmony, alignment, repetition, hierarchy)
- Ideation sketching, schematic sketching and low-fidelity prototyping
What the exam asks
Unit 1 is not externally examined, since the examination is set on Unit 4, and is covered by school-based internal assessment. Its payoff at exam time is fluency. The sketching conventions, annotation habits and criteria-writing language you build here are exactly what the examination expects you to produce quickly and legibly under time pressure.
Where marks go missing
Treating drawing as illustration. Ideation sketches carrying no annotation communicate nothing about your thinking, and in a subject where the reasoning is the assessed object, an unlabelled beautiful sketch is worth less than a rough annotated one.
Area 2 of 4
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.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 7 points
- Topic 1: Responding to needs and wants
- The role of the client in commercial design
- Economic, social and cultural influences on commercial design
- Collaborative design approaches
- Defining commercial design problems and design criteria
- Devising and refining ideas using divergent and convergent thinking
- Communicating design concepts to a commercial/client audience
What the exam asks
Unit 2 is covered by internal assessment rather than the examination. It matters at exam time because the same commercial pressures reappear inside Unit 4 sustainability questions. A circular strategy that costs the client too much or confuses the market is not a strong proposal, and Unit 2 is where you learn to say why.
Where marks go missing
Confusing the client with the stakeholder. A response that designs to please the person paying while ignoring the person who has to use the thing has misread the brief, and those two rarely want the same product.
Area 3 of 4
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.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 8 points
- Topic 1: Designing with empathy
- Human attitudes, expectations, motivations and experiences (four-pleasure framework; attract/converse/transact framework)
- Ergonomics and anthropometric data (clearance, reach, adjustability, percentiles)
- Designing-with-empathy techniques (observations, interviews, experiences) and empathy maps
- Defining HCD problems and design criteria from stakeholder requirements
- Devising ideas using divergent thinking, sketching and low-fidelity prototyping
- Evaluating and refining ideas using convergent thinking and stakeholder feedback
- Proposing and communicating HCD design concepts to stakeholders
What the exam asks
Unit 3 is assessed internally through the design challenge rather than in the examination, but the skills transfer directly. The examination asks you to define a problem and justify concepts for people described in the stimulus, which is Unit 3 method applied to a Unit 4 context, so empathy evidence and criteria writing stay live.
Where marks go missing
Inventing stakeholder evidence. Empathy maps and criteria asserting what users would want, with no observation, interview or lived experience behind them, collapse the moment a marker asks where that particular requirement came from.
Area 4 of 4
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.
What the syllabus lists under this area · 8 points
- Topic 1: Responding to opportunities
- Identifying design opportunities (gap in market, new market, improving wellbeing)
- Economic, social and ecological sustainability
- Design life cycle (launch, growth, maturity, decline) and linear vs circular design
- Circular design strategies (product as a service, product life extension, closed loop/take back, modularity)
- Planned obsolescence and how design decisions encourage/discourage it
- Defining sustainable design problems, stakeholders, constraints and design criteria
- Devising, refining and communicating sustainable design concepts
What the exam asks
The examination is one extended-response question with stimulus, set on this unit. You are handed an unfamiliar sustainability scenario and must define the design problem, propose concepts in visual and written mode, and justify them against named strategies and design criteria. Marks follow the reasoning shown on the page, not the finish of the drawing.
Where marks go missing
Naming a circular strategy without designing it. Writing modularity or take-back as a label, with no drawn or described mechanism for how parts separate or how products return, gives the marker nothing to reward beyond recall.