Author: Claudia Eckert

  • WIDE Women in Innovation, Design and Engineering

    WIDE Women in Innovation, Design and Engineering

    Women in Innovation, Design and Engineering Conference at Walton Hall   By Claudia Eckert and Fiona Gleed The School of Engineering and Innovation at the Open University has been organising Women in Engineering conferences, targeted at female students, since 2016. After a three-year break enforced by Covid, we have finally been able to go back […]

  • Women in Innovation, Design and Engineering

    Women in Innovation, Design and Engineering

    Engineering is still far from reaching gender equality. In 2020 only about 15% of engineers were women in the UK (Women’s Engineering Society, 2022). Design is in a slightly better position with 22% of female designers in the workforce (Design Council, 2023). The design sectors with the highest numbers of female staff also have the […]

  • Fostering Sustainable Practices in Fashion

    Fostering Sustainable Practices in Fashion

    Finally, sustainability in fashion is being noticed. The fast fashion of the last decades has given us cheap clothes of often doubtful quality, which is fast bought and fast disposed. The cheap clothes is often produced in low wage countries and shipped half across the world just to end up in landfill in Europe and […]

  • Designing in an uncertain future

    Designing in an uncertain future

    Designers want to generate products that meet their users’ needs and that delight them for a long time. Some products, like trains or aircraft, have life spans of many decades. However, components or subsystem can endure for much longer as they are used across many product generations. Something that is designed now might well be […]

  • Design Bytes

    Design Bytes

    The Industrial Designers Society OF America IDSA has thousands of members and runs design conferences and competitions. It also maintains a website with a large repository of design stories and materials as well as links to external materials on design from interviews with famous designers to new manufacturing methods. Its DesignBytes pages give a great impression of the […]

  • There is more to methods than a good idea

    There is more to methods than a good idea

    Designers have mixed feelings about methods. Christopher Alexander, the architect and design theoretician said “If you call it, ‘It’s a Good Idea To Do’, I like it very much; if you call it a ‘Method’, I like it but I’m beginning to get turned off; if you call it a ‘Methodology’, I just don`t want […]