Abstract
This article presents an investigation into the value-based affordances of volition as an integral philosophical component of technology education, specifically in relation to design methodology. As the central aspect of technology education, design has a prominent position in curricula all over the world, not just in subjects named Design and Technology, but also in most technology and engineering subjects in schools. In philosophy, it has been asserted that design volition (axiology) has a strong relationship with and in many ways forms the basis of design as a methodological stance. The primary philosophical frameworks used as the foundation for the philosophical analysis presented in this article are the ones introduced by Carl Mitcham in his Thinking through Technology (1994) and Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology. We perform a narrative review of relevant literature. Based on this review, we attempt a clearer definition of the lucid concept of volition/axiology in the literature, as well as explicate the relationship between axiology and methodology. In particular, we investigate this relationship in terms of values, intentionality, and sustainability in design. We review design as a societal and value-laden phenomenon, prone to strong and weak intentionality where expert and lay designers converge or diverge on sustainable values depending on the amount of interpretative flexibility. Concerning implications, school teaching needs to be founded on design volition which does not reduce technology education to technical education. Technology teachers and students need to be explicit about the values involved at all levels of technology and to clarify, justify, and debate their choices. Students must also be exposed to the way in which “sustainable values” might decrease interpretative flexibility and increase the opportunities for a technology to be sustainable in the medium to long term.