A blog about design at the OU.
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Will a robot take your (design) job?
As designers, happily embedded in the creative industries, we may feel that our jobs are safe from the looming automation that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will bring to the job market. For example, explore the BBC’s tool for predicting the likelihood that a robot could take your job, and you will find that design […]
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Design education in India and the UK
The Design Group are involved in the early stages of a project looking at design education in India and the UK and how further ties might be generated in these areas. The next series of workshops and visits will take place at the end of January 2018 (full report to follow!). But in the meantime […]
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EqualBITE – Gender Equality in Higher Education
Over the past 2 years I’ve been working with the original BITE team (Judy Robertson and Alison Williams) and colleagues at Edinburgh University (Lara Isbel and Daphne Loads) to produce EqualBITE: Gender Equality in Higher Education. (PS It’s available FREE to download from the publisher’s website (so stop reading this and go get it now!): […]
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Design, Architecture, Photography: Every House on Langland Road
Milton Keynes has just marked the 50th anniversary of designation as one of the UK’s last new towns. The whole place is a remarkable piece of design research with its meticulous plans and radical ideas which have survived, to varying degrees, both in the archive and the built environment. One of the key early objectives of the […]
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Creativity and collaboration as a means to engage women in engineering?
Last week I attended Inside Government’s “Promoting Women in STEM” forum in Manchester. It was great to spend a day with like-minded people, discussing the challenges associated with achieving greater gender diversity in STEM related jobs and education. Helen Wollaston, Chief Executive of the Women in Science and Engineering campaign (https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/ ) highlighted the leaky […]
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Digital Design Learning: Conference Report
Food for thought The conference dinner was served in the school’s own ‘Food lab’ by a team of academics and students at KISD – the Cologne International School of Design. The lab is designed to do social experiments, in which food becomes the mediator of conversations and the lab a space for co-creation of products and […]
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Diagrams and design – soft thoughts.
Here is a diagram taken from a recent article in Journal of Cleaner Production which will be familiar with some readers. Are such diagrams useful in designing? Ehsan N et al 2017 Boundary matters: the potential of system dynamics to support sustainability? Journal of Cleaner Production, 140(1) 312-323 I am not talking about sketches of […]
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Design and social responsibility
There has been a growing recognition of the ethical and social responsibilities designers face, particularly within the design research community. Many of our current PhD students choose to grapple with problems or questions that affect society more generally, most notably sustainable production or sustainable living, as well as issues of representation, equality, justice and democratisation. […]
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Smart and Modern Materials
“We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota (TEDGlobal 2012). “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” In this TED Talk video Moto shows some interesting examples. The notion of […]
