Author: Stephen Potter

  • Lessons from a Santaless Sleigh

    Lessons from a Santaless Sleigh

    Having been asked to provide a Design Blog just ahead of Christmas, I wondered how I might combine this yuletide timing with my design research. I have been working on both research and teaching pieces that explore the product, service and system design impacts of emerging electric and autonomous vehicle technologies. That’s not very Christmassy. […]

  • Contemplating the Future of Public Transport

    Contemplating the Future of Public Transport

    Miguel Valdez and Matt Cook and I have been asked to write an article for The Conversation on ‘The Future of Public Transport’ and I am grappling with the draft text at this very moment. It’s not that we haven’t been doing very relevant research on the design of transport systems and their implications, but […]

  • Designing Intelligent Mobility

    Designing Intelligent Mobility

      This week I received a long-awaited early Christmas present. My Design Group colleagues, Matthew Cook, Miguel Valdez, James Warren and I had written a chapter entitled Towards an Intelligent Mobility Regime in the second edition of the Elsevier book Intelligent Environments.  As often happens for a major internationally co-authored publication, this has been almost […]

  • My Design@50 Research story

    My Design@50 Research story

    Last month, Jeff Johnson and I were interviewed in the online event OU Design Research @50. In the discussion, ably steered by Claudia Eckert, Jeff and I reflected on how design research has developed at the OU and what is distinctive about the OU’s design research approach. I thought for this blog it might be useful […]

  • Redesigning how to tackle sustainability

    Redesigning how to tackle sustainability

    In her thought-provoking blog in November, Alice Moncaster expressed the hope that, following COP26’s image of male, white, and wealthy people making decisions, that COP27 would be “redesigned in a way that allows all people to participate equally that works best for them”, concluding that “the most sustainable solutions are those which are designed by […]

  • Homeworld ’81 revisited

    Homeworld ’81 revisited

    The Homeworld ’81 BBC Future Home 2000  Last month I attended one of the online events celebrating the 40thanniversary of the Milton Keynes Homeworld ‘81 exhibition. Yes, I am old enough to have been there (so was Robin Roy and a number of other old timers from the OU). Indeed, as I was covering the […]

  • Covid-19: a catalyst for redesigning transport services?

    Covid-19: a catalyst for redesigning transport services?

    Among his plethora of typically journalistic sound bites, last week the Prime Minister expressed the desire that the Covid-19 pandemic could be a “catalyst for change”. He was picking up the growing desire not to return to the ‘old normal’ but shift to a new, more sustainable and regenerative trajectory. There’s a lot of this […]

  • Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel….

    Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel….

    There’s a lot circulating around about how we might emerge from Covid-19 by using its disruptions to embrace sustainability. Now it seems that Boris is proposing a big car scrappage scheme to subsidise electric vehicles, together with encouraging bikes and making electric scooters legal. But social and economic transformations involve a few more wheels within […]

  • Transformative Transport design

    Transformative Transport design

    Sometimes something happens that represents the tipping point between simply enhancing the design of an existing product or service and when a transformative redesign happens. I am wondering if we are about to hit this for urban transport systems. The modern tram is frequently seen as a core high quality public transport system, but its […]

  • Getting good social design to happen

    Getting good social design to happen

    Georgy Holden’s post last week got me thinking. Do have a look at it. Georgy made a link between the philanthropic housing activities of the 19th century ‘model village’ builders and the lessons for today with the push for the private sector to build vast amounts of new homes. She is so right that there […]