A blog about design at the OU.
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Children’s design capacity
Every year, our first-year students develop a board game for one of their design projects. I love looking at the responses to the brief because the assignment gives scope to show systemic as well as detail thinking. The students’ board game proposals curate an elaborate ensemble of the game track, action cards and playing pieces […]
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Engineering design on show
The Engineering Design Show in the Coventry Ricoh Arena last week provided a great opportunity for Design academics Nicole Lotz and Georgy Holden to see companies showing state-of-the-art design engineering as well as to meet with one of our new design students. A strong theme in the show was 3D printing. This ranged from day […]
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A swiss excursion in minimal design
Visited a couple of Swiss buildings recently which motivated some thoughts on minimal Design. Corbusier designed a lovely lakeside ‘Petite Maison’ for his parents near Vevey, Switzerland. It was built in 1923, to minimal principles (although its appearance is complexified by later cladding). The architectural composition is linear along the lake shore with views to the […]
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Fashion UK – sustainability and ethics
High profile leaders from the Fashion Industry meet with politicians and academics in Westminster on 20 November 2019 to discuss sustainability and ethics in fashion. This conference follows a report from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee in February 2019. Design is central to meeting industry sustainability goals. It is tremendous that these issues […]
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Designers Telling Stories
Netflix has recently released season two of Abstract: The Art of Design, a series which celebrates innovative designers from a range of fields, including fashion, graphics, interface, architecture, automotive, etc. Some of the designers may be familiar to you, if not by name then perhaps by output. For example, Tinker Hatfiled (Season 1 Episode 2) […]
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Yorkshire Sculpture Park
The Open University is part of a Centre for Doctoral Training, called DesignStar http://www.designstar.org.uk. The centre had organised a Summer School at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park https://ysp.org.uk a couple of weeks back. On the first day, the group of around 20 students and supervisors had a choice to attend either of two sessions led by the […]
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Design Revolutions? IASDR 2019
The IASDR2019, a biannual conference on design research, organised by the International Association of Societies for Design Research, brought together a truly international group of researchers and designers. This year’s theme ‘design revolutions’ steered some discussions around design and change. I asked myself: As we are living in a more and more chaotic and rebellious […]
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Conference Report: Learn X Design 2019
Conference Report: Learn X Design 2019 | Crossposted from https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/learn-x-design-2019 The fifth annual DRS Pedagogy SIG Learn X Design conference, Insider Knowledge, was held July 9-12 at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. And the Design Group were represented by both past and present members. The conference hosted 150 delegates from 81 institutions in […]
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Playmobil as a design and communication tool
PhD students at the OU are encouraged to engage in ‘research dissemination’, so that we can share our research with lots of different audiences with various knowledge levels. Every year in early June the graduate school holds a Postgraduate Research Poster Competition to give us an opportunity to share our research. As a first year […]
