A blog about design at the OU.
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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 […]
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About the privilege of learning through mistakes
This blog post is about how I learn from making mistakes. We tell our first-year design students that it is essential not to dismay when they make mistakes. In fact, making a mistake and reflecting on why this mistake happened (and possibly how to avoid it next time) is the best that can happen to […]
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‘UK Makerspace – make things, do stuff and knit the community together’
Over a decade ago the term Makerspace, Hackerspace or Fablab would have been a relatively unknown term by the general populous. If the terms were understood then perhaps they would be thought of as niche or even geeky. Today the term Makerspace, Hackerspace or Fablab are more commonly known and to date there are over […]
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The Guide to Creating Distance Design Courses is finally here!
As part of our work to support design educators transposing to online and distance teaching, we’ve created a guide for Creating Distance Design Courses, which is now available here: https://distancedesigneducation.com/creating-distance-design-courses/ It took a bit longer than expected (it started out as a blog post but ended up being a 20k word monster!), so there’s a […]
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Redesigning major infrastructure projects for a post Covid19 world
As lockdown measures ease many people are wondering what will life be like post Covid19. Will there be a new normal in which society operates in profoundly different ways with less travel for example, more online meetings and working at home. Or will it be a little like when we take a holiday, we return […]
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Fieldwork is Fun!?
I’m researching ways to reduce carbon emissions from residential heritage buildings while retaining their heritage values. I’m focussing on Cumbria and the Lake District National Park and before the small matter of coronavirus prevented all activities I was halfway through my fieldwork. My fieldwork is made up of visits to residential buildings across Cumbria and […]
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Patterns of invention, design and innovation – the case of vacuum cleaners
Today almost all households in industrialised countries have at least one vacuum cleaner. But after World War Two the adoption of vacuum cleaners was surprisingly slow, and it was not until 1955 that half of British ones owned one. The main reason was that a vacuum cleaner, even if bought on hire purchase, was beyond […]
