A blog about design at the OU.
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50 Things And More That Made Today’s World
Like Dr Seuss’ metaphorical ‘The Cat in the Hat’ BBC Radio 4 opens the box to release ” 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy“. The “Things” did not stop at 50 but kept coming throughout the first and second series. “These things will not bite you” said “The Cat in the Hat”, but are […]
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Makerversity: the changing face of independent design work
A few weeks ago some OU design academics plus regional and part-time staff signed up for a tour of the “Makerversity” located in the bowels of Somerset House in London. Makerversity is, undoubtedly, the biggest maker-space in the UK. With space for more than 350 members and spread over two basement floors, it offers a […]
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Moving to Mars
We had our first family-oriented qualification event on Sunday, 23rd of February in London. We went to the Design Museum and made some puppets with our families and visited the ‘Moving to Mars’ exhibition. My daughter loves hedgehogs. So, this is what we aimed for as a puppet. My daughter commented in the video demonstration […]
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A strange collection of objects or ground-breaking inclusive design?
Helen Hamlyn (2019) design innovation awards What are these objects? How can we use them? Are they modern or vintage? Answers on a postcard please… #HH@theRCA Helen Hamlyn (HH)Trust has been breaking new boundaries in inclusive design since 1991 and became fully founded in 1999. The Helen Hamlyn centre is the largest centre for design […]
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Creating a womens’ network
Part of our trip to Mexico in December was focused on a British Council project to aid the creation of a network for women in science and business on the Yucatan peninsula. A series of events was run in conjunction with the Universidad Privado de la Peninsula (UPP) and the Instituto Yucateco de Emprendedores (IYEM) […]
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Cities of permanent experiments and atmospheres of reception
We have been thinking quite a bit about the effect that urban experiments may have on cities, particularly when sustainability experiments become business as usual. This was inspired by our recently work on an Innovate UK project, On Street Residential Induction Charging (or OSRIC for short). The project involves the deployment of wireless chargers for […]
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The Design Group at TEDx – Part 2: Imagine what’s next… the future of aircraft manufacturing is additive
On 8th November 2019 I participated in TEDx Open University. When I sent off my audition video last summer, I had no idea how much time and effort it would take to develop a 10 minute talk! I applied to speak at TEDx because I was keen to share my research on sustainable manufacturing with […]
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155 card-based design tools
In November 2017 I wrote a Design@Open blog on some preliminary findings of research that James Warren and I were doing on card decks as tools for designers and designing. Since then we have completed our work and published the results in Design Studies (Roy and Warren, 2019). This article is embargoed until late March […]
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FabLab Yucatan – prototyping the future together
Ileana (President of the Fab City Yucatán Association), Oscar, and Carlos gave us a tour of Fablab Yucatan when we visited Merida, Mexico in November 2019. You can watch the video of the tour on https://www.facebook.com/728801612/videos/10157850699341613/ (approx. 1h 15min) The Lab first opened as HUBlab in 2015. The vision was to form a creative ecosystem of […]
