A blog about design at the OU.
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Food, shelter and re-designing home
As a new resident in Milton Keynes, I’ve brought along my decades-long curiosity about how people live day to day and how they organise themselves in different places and cultures to meet needs for food and shelter. Since neither can be guaranteed for all people anywhere in a world of deepening inequality, designers committed to […]
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Lessons from a Santaless Sleigh
Having been asked to provide a Design Blog just ahead of Christmas, I wondered how I might combine this yuletide timing with my design research. I have been working on both research and teaching pieces that explore the product, service and system design impacts of emerging electric and autonomous vehicle technologies. That’s not very Christmassy. […]
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Presenting Futures Literacy to the Scottish Government
One of the things we get to do now and again as academics is to speak to governments and politicians in policy areas we are interested in. This year, the OU in Scotland contributed to the Royal Society of Chemistry event Science and the Parliament event. This brings together scientists, business, politicians, and government to […]
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Designing for the future of mobility: A Day at Coventry Museum of Transport
In an era dominated by remote work, the significance of in-person collaborative design events cannot be overstated. While our students study design at a distance, the occasional face-to-face gathering remains crucial for boosting morale and fostering a sense of community that can be challenging to achieve remotely. Amidst the constraints imposed by the pandemic, opportunities […]
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The BAD Conference
I recently had the opportunity to attend The Bad Conference, part of Product Design Week #PDW23, organised by Tech Circus in London. The turnout for the in-person event was impressive, with 250 individuals joining in person. Networking, an essential part of such gatherings, felt notably different post-Covid. Rather than the fluid mingling of the past, […]
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Our Design Internship Sisterhood
By Ida Rodrigues and Cindy Darbandi (OU Design Curriculum Interns and Consultants) In 2022, the Open University developed a virtual internship opportunity to support the diversification of the new design curriculum. We applied separately for the two intern roles that were available while studying different courses towards our design degrees. We both were curious about […]
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Anxiety and Optimism: Designs on Barbenheimer.
As an 11 year old in the early 70s, I was fascinated by the idea that the tiniest components of everything in the world, (including ourselves), had within them the power to obliterate the planet. I read avidly about the structure of atoms, and what they had the potential to unleash. The Cold War fuelled […]
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Decolonising Curriculum: A Search for the Middle Path in Design Education
In the last five centuries, curriculum theorisation has been drawn from platforms laid by Western Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies, resulting in the duality of knowledge structures (epistemic privilege and epistemic inferiority) known as Cartesian logic. Hence, the central approach to decolonising curriculum involves a critical analysis of how Cartesian duality has shaped what we know, […]
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Designing the ‘Fry Equation’
Harmonising purpose: exploring the ‘Fry Equation’ and bridging the gap between reform and service design by Rachel A.Wood. Whilst undertaking some literature searches for my design research project, I started to look at significant figures who have worked tirelessly to design, reform, and transform the criminal justice system for mothers in the UK. I […]
