A blog about design at the OU.
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Gift for Mental Health
Black Friday, cyber Monday… and all sorts of other market strategies all year around often feed on our vulnerabilities and mental distress. As Ernest Becker portrayed in The Denial of Death, the consumer ‘religion’ is just another way to shed away existential terrors, anaesthetise ourselves. But what if things were designed intentionally to reflect a little more […]
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A Trendy Design Post: Trend Design
You may think that Trend Design is all about gazing into a crystal ball, or putting on floaty Kaftans whilst using mythical mend bending meditation tactics to realise trends of the future. However, Trend Design is much more than just the black art of marketing, it can offer the next trending colour or the […]
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The challenges of smart city mobilities
Smart urbanisation is one of the main approaches for cities around the world to realise their social, environmental and economic goals. Applying the latest ‘smart IT ‘to augment transport, energy, communication and other urban systems and services that underpin everyday life in cities is seen increasingly as necessary and desirable. However, research shows that there […]
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Joining designerly dots
This is a post by Stephen Potter, Professor Emeritus at Design and Innovation This Thursday a one-off return of the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World is appearing on BBC4. As a kid, in the 1960s this programme really stimulated my interest in design and technology. Each week a set of potentially life-changing gizmos and gadgets were demonstrated […]
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Beyond Buzzwords: the language of collaborative design
In collaboration with our strategic partners, The Glass-House Community Led Design, we recently organised and delivered an event to explore key terms used to describe collaborative design activity: co-design, co-production, participation and community-led design. These terms are used by some people interchangeably, while others assign specific meaning and kinds of practices to each one. To […]
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The MAC Belfast: building and thinking
Belfast’s contemporary art gallery, the Metropolitan Arts Centre, affectionately known as The MAC, designed by Hackett Hall McKnight, is an interesting building, opened in 2012 it sits on a site that is strangely shaped, wedged between existing buildings but this gives the building a dynamic feel. There are two parts to the building, auditoria for […]
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The Make Up Dept – design thinking for the film industry
On the “Late Night Studio Tour” at Belfast design week, Pamela Smyth, founder of The Make Up Dept, talked with passion and honesty about her work. Her company specialises in designing the make-up for film and television production, and in particular wounds, disfigurements and character creation. This work has taken Pamela all over the world […]
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CALLAN – textile design at Belfast design week
Mary Callan introduced us to her Textile design label CALLAN at the Belfast Design Week Portview studio tour. She has demonstrated and compared two techniques she uses – Jacquard weaving and Intarsia knitting. Jacquard waving has an important place in the development of Computing. It inspired the developments in writing computer programmes. For weaving, you punch […]
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McGonigle McGrath design process
As part of a tour around design studios in Belfast’s Portview Trade Centre, we visited the award-winning Architecture studio, McGonigle McGrath. Kieran McGonigle explained to us how they work, what principles they follow and what a typical design process entails for them. Kieran highlighted two aspects, in particular, sketching and model making, that inform their […]
