A blog about design at the OU.
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The Science and Poetry of Messy thinking
This post started out as a few reflections on a few distance design education events I attended recently, where most of the discussions did not centre around online vs face-to-face or technology and IT services. Instead, discussion focused on learning and teaching – basic stuff, like ideas around how to make learning activities engaging (for […]
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Celebrating Student Work
The OU Design Student Annual Exhibition 2020, launched online on June 25th with an event attended by more than 80 students and staff at which two designers talked, Ben Sippel on Design in Lockdown ( https://www.metalstairs.com) and Tanveer Ahmed on Decolonising Design (https://www.antennebooks.com/product/modes-of-criticism-4-radical-pedagogy ). Unlike most other design schools, the OU exhibition always features work from […]
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Designing in partnership
This blog was co-authored by Abbie Jackson, Anna Ward-Stancheva, Georgy Holden, Leo Rees-Evans, Mar Reyes, Nicole Lotz and Rebekah Manston, all Design and Innovation students at the Open University. On June 25th 2020, the third annual exhibition of work of OU design students was launched. Every year, we invite students to design the exhibition together […]
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An ecological turn
As is the usual way of things for me, it was a couple of days before the abstract deadline that I clocked this conference in Bologna next January: The Ecological Turn. Design, architecture and aesthetics beyond “Anthropocene”. A key question they ask and describe is: ‘How does the ecological thinking affect architects, designers and the […]
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Site selection criteria for urban innovation experiments – towards a guidance note for practitioners
Selecting a site for the demonstration of innovative technologies in urban settings is not usually straightforward, even after a specific city has been chosen. A city is not a place but a constellation of places and each place has its own socio-technical dynamics, networks and interactions. Outcomes will be different when the same urban experiment […]
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GAME, co-designed by clients at Psychosis Therapy Project, at PDC 2020
The Participatory Design Conference, which was going to be held in Colombia, happened online this year. Although I am sad to have missed the opportunity to work with local communities and run the situated action in Manizales, Colombia, the organizers did a great job to create interactive sessions and exhibitions in virtual spaces. Through virtual […]
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Design and Culture
Design and Culture This journal Design and Culture might we worth a look. There are a multitude of questions about how Design plays out in topical issues of Culture and cultures. Art is sometimes enshrined as the embodiment of Culture; reposing timeless and universal. Another ‘culture’ relative to time, place and people, fights for space […]
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Fieldwork is fun! Update
This is a quick update on my previous post now that the OU research competition is over. The previous one talked about how I made the video (which you can read here). https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/design/fieldwork-is-fun/ It was great fun to make and it was really pleasing that it won the multimedia community choice category in the recent competition: http://www.open.ac.uk/research/news/ou-postgraduate-research-poster-competition-2020. […]
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Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel….
There’s a lot circulating around about how we might emerge from Covid-19 by using its disruptions to embrace sustainability. Now it seems that Boris is proposing a big car scrappage scheme to subsidise electric vehicles, together with encouraging bikes and making electric scooters legal. But social and economic transformations involve a few more wheels within […]
