Recent understandings of ‘design’ and, in particular design education have become entrenched within schools and higher education as approaches to provide students with opportunities to develop creativity and imagination, and the skills needed for a globalized future. Drawing from Australian curriculum documents, this paper presents a content analysis that locates representations of design and establishes whether current representations support the building of twenty-first century capabilities. The development of curriculum is positioned within the paper as an ideological act that establishes normative discourses of design and compares them with ‘the other’. Our findings demonstrate that design is represented in multiple ways across the Australian Curriculum and that teachers are presented with a specific discourse of design in curriculum documents from different key learning areas. We argue that a dominant re-constructed representation of design within curriculum has the potential to standardize currently discipline specific understandings of design with implications for the enacted curriculum in the classroom and the key discipline design capabilities acquired by students.

对“设计”尤其是设计教育的最新理解已在学校和高等教育中根深蒂固，以此为学生提供发展创造力和想象力以及全球化未来所需技能的机会。本文从澳大利亚的课程文件中抽取内容，进行了内容分析，以定位设计表示形式，并确定当前的表示形式是否支持21世纪能力的建设。课程的发展是作为一种意识形态行为定位在本文中的，该行为确立了设计的规范话语并将它们与“其他”进行比较。我们的发现表明，设计在澳大利亚课程中以多种方式表示，并且在来自不同关键学习领域的课程文档中，向教师介绍了设计的特定论述。我们认为，课程中占主导地位的重构设计表示形式有可能标准化当前学科对设计的特定理解，从而对教室中已制定的课程和学生获得的关键学科设计能力产生影响。