A blog about design at the OU.
-
Celebrating our Gurnos
On a lovely sunny Saturday at the end of September, people on the outskirts of Merthyr got together to celebrate the place and community of Gurnos. The celebration was the outcome of several activities in partnership with the Open University in Wales as part of two different projects: the Creu Cyffro Community Renewal Funded project, […]
-
Every city needs a Supergarden!
During the last weeks of summer, hot on the athletic heels of the Commonwealth Games, Birmingham burst into flower with the arrival of a spectacular supergarden. PoliNations, a celebration of Birmingham’s diverse population, wove an exploration of the city’s cultural heritage with that of the plants that adorn and breath oxygen into its gardens, conceived […]
-
U101 – A Triumphant Return to Face-Face Tutorials
Module U101: Design Thinking in the 21st Century, has always had, since its launch in 2010, a tradition of running face to face tutorials (day schools) to augment the online module delivery and tutorials. While the student attendance at these events had seen a gradual decline in recent years, nevertheless, from those that did regularly […]
-
Governing sustainable urban innovation: navigating the generic and specific.
In many UK towns and cities the search for responses to climate change is framed by extant urban fabrics and thus favour incumbent technologies and actors associated with these. For example, road networks which favour motorised vehicles have almost inevitably directed sustainable transport innovation toward electric vehicles produced by established vehicle manufacturers. Indeed, rendering transport […]
-
John Christopher Jones: In Memoriam – by Nigel Cross
The first Professor of Design at the Open University, the pioneering, internationally renowned and influential design researcher John Christopher Jones died on the 13th August 2022, in London, at the age of 95. John Chris at his 80th birthday party, Hampstead Heath and at the 50th Anniversary DRS conference, Brighton, 2016 (Photos: Robin Roy) Known […]
-
Design@50 – Design in a Time of Climate Emergency
The latest Design@50 event focused on the topic Design in a Time of Climate Emergency, featuring reflections and discussion between Prof Stephen Peake, Dr Emma Dewberry, Dr Alessandra Campoli and Dr Derek Jones. The event also featured archive footage from the first Open University course that introduced design, connecting it to far broader issues around […]
-
Walking the memory lane to gain design inspirations
Design education at the OU encourages students to draw inspiration from everyday experiences. I learned this week that revisiting the history of your lived experiences is also an excellent source for design inspiration. I grew up in Magdeburg in former East Germany, in a newly build neighbourhood in the 1980’s. In 2022, I returned to […]
-
Sense and the city
New OU Design Group Publication! Sense and the city: An Emotion Data Framework for smart city governance Christian Nold http://oro.open.ac.uk/83446/ This paper demonstrates what emotion can ‘do’ when citizen actively use emotions to participate in the problem framing in smart city governance. The paper offers a framework of smart city participation with emotion data by […]
-
Digital education for sustainable teachings in the future.
By Dr. Gil Dekel. To achieve sustainable education for the future we need to adopt new ways of teaching that move away from segregating people to uniting people. Divisions in societies are created by such values as individual success of one over the other, or the belief in international competition. On the other hand, teachings […]
Login to add a post
Got any topic recommendations?
Subscribe to the blog?