Conceptual design tasks can take as little as half and hour to complete, and involve asking student to come up with ideas for a challenge, but not build them. These activities can be a good starting point for getting students to talk about a Generic Design Cycle or the Design Strategies that they use as a team.

In MOVIE 1, you will hear David Barlex talk about a 12-week curriculum that was developed at Nuffield and is used in the United Kingdom which aims to build upon UK's students previous years of experience doing design-and-build. With a experience-based knowledge of what can and can't be made, students are primed to be asked to think broadly and creatively to come up with new product ideas. With such a background, students do not make the typical naive strategy of happily proposing ideas that could not possibly be made -- a common strategy naive designer fall into when initially confronted with a conceptual design task.