A blog about design at the OU.
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Covid-19: a catalyst for redesigning transport services?
Among his plethora of typically journalistic sound bites, last week the Prime Minister expressed the desire that the Covid-19 pandemic could be a “catalyst for change”. He was picking up the growing desire not to return to the ‘old normal’ but shift to a new, more sustainable and regenerative trajectory. There’s a lot of this […]
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A rose by any other name…
If the prevailing brand culture is a reliable indicator, then society at large is seemingly obsessed with names. Products, including electronics, fashion, food, etc., are bought because of the name slapped on them, often without much more thought. And, it often seems that political discourse and public debate suffers from a similar affliction, where complex […]
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Reflections on participatory design at the OU- in a Design Emergency
There are a few advantages that stem from the current pandemic. As well as momentary improvement in air quality and watching wildlife re-occupy some urban environments, conferences that previously we would have had to travel to, can now be joined on a mobile phone. This opens up many possibilities – conversations taking place across the […]
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Where do you test an innovation? – optimising under constraints
In this blog entry we will discuss the selection of sites for deploying urban innovation (for example, for demonstrators, living-labs or technical trials), sharing some thoughts that arose in response to developments in a real-life project we are supporting. Our work in the project reminded us that site selection is not trivial- context matters for […]
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Corbusier on my mind: Design thinking and post-covid living.
Ever since we have been singing a double Happy Birthday during our 20 second hand-washing rituals at every available washbasin, Le Corbusier has been on my mind. I had previously thought he must have had some rather paranoiac tendencies born of a childhood discomfiture that made him feel it necessary to have sinks throughout his […]
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OU Design Summer School 2020 – Week 2 (and mostly 3 if I’m honest…)
OK, so in the best traditions of being an OU student: life got in the way of what I wanted to do; I realised that what I wanted to do was probably a bit, and I failed to meet my own deadlines… But part of being an OU student is that with these difficulties come […]
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OU Design Summer School 2020 – Week 1
A few of us are working on an OU Design Summer School this year and we already have a great bunch of students working on this. It’s a bit of an experiment in terms of trying to get a community of learning going with a whole range of individual learning goals. I’ll blog separately about […]
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The Challenge of Re-Opening a Community Garden – The Covid-19 Crisis and Access to and Uses of Green spaces in Cities
Now that the UK lock-down has been eased, although we observe increasingly local lockdowns being actioned, we can start to look back at what impact the Covid-19 crisis had and continues to have on social life in cities. In this short blogpost, I want to share some initial thoughts on the access to and uses […]
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10 years of Connected Communities
Last week, AHRC released two videos to share insights from its Connected Communities programme which you can view on their homepage. Connected Communities was an innovative cross-council initiative, which brought academics and partners from civil society, local government, the arts, culture and social enterprise to work together to understand the role and impact of communities in […]
