Author: Robin Roy

  • Calculating your carbon footprint

    Calculating your carbon footprint

    Earlier in 2022 I was asked to produce some material for OpenLearn on carbon footprints as part of the OU’s Carbon Literacy training and the Digital Transformation project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. The OpenLearn article is at: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/calculating-your-carbon-footprint After discussing what is meant by a carbon footprint and ‘net zero’, […]

  • John Christopher Jones: In Memoriam – by Nigel Cross

    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 […]

  • COP26 – Is 1.5 still alive?

    COP26 – Is 1.5 still alive?

        After unprecedented global news coverage, the United Nations COP26 conference ended on 13 November 2021 with the Glasgow Climate Pact agreed by the 196 countries present. The Pact was only achieved after a last-minute weakening of its wording on the use of coal from ‘phase out’ to ‘phase down’ after objections from India […]

  • COP26 UN Climate Change Conference – ‘Code red for Humanity’

    COP26 UN Climate Change Conference – ‘Code red for Humanity’

    Image; Rise in average surface temperature 2048-2051 from 1951-1980 based on IPCC 4th Report, Robin Roy, October 2020 As you’ve probably heard, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP) – called COP26 because it’s the 26th annual UN climate change conference since 1995 – will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from […]

  • What underpins creative and successful innovations?

    What underpins creative and successful innovations?

    I am currently writing a book covering a well-trodden path – creativity and innovation – with design as an essential link between these two activities. These are topics that have interested me since joining the Open University in the 1970s and have been the subject of much of my teaching and research since then. For […]

  • Black Inventors and Innovators: New Perspectives

    Black Inventors and Innovators: New Perspectives

    As part of Black History Month, The Smithsonian Institute’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation held a week-long webinar series, from 16-20 November 2020, about Black and other inventors of colour and Black technology consumers. The seminars also explored strategies for building a more equitable system of invention, patenting, finance and innovation […]

  • Patterns of invention, design and innovation – the case of vacuum cleaners

    Patterns of invention, design and innovation – the case of vacuum cleaners

    Today almost all households in industrialised countries have at least one vacuum cleaner. But after World War Two the adoption of vacuum cleaners was surprisingly slow, and it was not until 1955 that half of British ones owned one. The main reason was that a vacuum cleaner, even if bought on hire purchase, was beyond […]

  • 155 card-based design tools

    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 […]

  • Professor Godfrey Boyle

    Professor Godfrey Boyle

    Professor Godfrey Boyle, Emeritus Professor in the Design Group at the Open University, has sadly died. After studying Electrical Engineering at Queens University, Belfast and working as journalist for Electronics Weekly, in the early 1970s he founded ‘Undercurrents’, a pioneering quarterly magazine of ‘radical science and people’s technology’. ‘Undies’ initially came out as a collection […]

  • Bauhaus 100

    Bauhaus 100

    The Bauhaus –one of the world’s most influential art and design schools – was established by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919 and this year the centenary of its foundation is being celebrated in Germany and many other countries. Beginning in Weimar, relocated to Dessau in 1925 and closed in Berlin under pressure from […]