A blog about design at the OU.
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The MAC Belfast: building and thinking
Belfast’s contemporary art gallery, the Metropolitan Arts Centre, affectionately known as The MAC, designed by Hackett Hall McKnight, is an interesting building, opened in 2012 it sits on a site that is strangely shaped, wedged between existing buildings but this gives the building a dynamic feel. There are two parts to the building, auditoria for […]
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The Make Up Dept – design thinking for the film industry
On the “Late Night Studio Tour” at Belfast design week, Pamela Smyth, founder of The Make Up Dept, talked with passion and honesty about her work. Her company specialises in designing the make-up for film and television production, and in particular wounds, disfigurements and character creation. This work has taken Pamela all over the world […]
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CALLAN – textile design at Belfast design week
Mary Callan introduced us to her Textile design label CALLAN at the Belfast Design Week Portview studio tour. She has demonstrated and compared two techniques she uses – Jacquard weaving and Intarsia knitting. Jacquard waving has an important place in the development of Computing. It inspired the developments in writing computer programmes. For weaving, you punch […]
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McGonigle McGrath design process
As part of a tour around design studios in Belfast’s Portview Trade Centre, we visited the award-winning Architecture studio, McGonigle McGrath. Kieran McGonigle explained to us how they work, what principles they follow and what a typical design process entails for them. Kieran highlighted two aspects, in particular, sketching and model making, that inform their […]
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Design dreams of the material world – but is it sympathetic?
Have a listen to BBC Radio 4’s two-part series, The Sympathy of Things in which the architectural collective ‘Assemble’ – winners of the Turner Prize – explore the designed and manufactured world, arguing that just as mass production has disrupted and changed our relationship to the material world, so digital technologies will also disrupt these relationships […]
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Designing in an uncertain future
Designers want to generate products that meet their users’ needs and that delight them for a long time. Some products, like trains or aircraft, have life spans of many decades. However, components or subsystem can endure for much longer as they are used across many product generations. Something that is designed now might well be […]
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E-bikes charging ahead?
Has the time for e-bikes – electrically assisted cycles – arrived at last? E-bikes have been available for many years, and popular in China and parts of continental Europe, but only bought in small numbers in the UK. It’s only now that proper design thinking, research and development has been applied to them. Evidence for […]
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3D printing; What is it good for?
3D printing, technically referred to as additive manufacturing, is often heralded as the manufacturing process of the future. This is because it is a very flexible process, and is able to produce forms that cannot be manufactured using traditional methods. In theory anything that can be represented as a 3D model in a CAD file […]
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What’s new in aircraft design?
This week I attended the Royal Aeronautical Society 6th Aircraft Structural Design conference (https://www.aerosociety.com/events-calendar/6th-aircraft-structural-design-conference/) hosted at ‘We the Curious’ in Bristol. The conference aimed to address the challenges faced by designers of next generation aircraft, including environmental constraints, advanced manufacturing and materials as well as new design approaches. Smart and efficient mobility with reduced environmental impact […]
