Category: Design comment

  • Design and social responsibility

    Design and social responsibility

    There has been a growing recognition of the ethical and social responsibilities designers face, particularly within the design research community. Many of our current PhD students choose to grapple with problems or questions that affect society more generally, most notably sustainable production or sustainable living, as well as issues of representation, equality, justice and democratisation. […]

  • Smart and Modern Materials

    Smart and Modern Materials

    “We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota (TEDGlobal 2012). “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” In this TED Talk video Moto shows some interesting examples. The notion of […]

  • Paper folding

    Paper folding

    I am fascinated by the folding design of pop-up books. I recently bought a pop-up card on a market and out of interested I asked the maker how they do these cards. He said: “I use Photoshop to create the designs and then laser-cut them”. I wondered though if there really was no analogue design process involved at […]

  • A bit of design manual history!

    A bit of design manual history!

    Found this little gem in a second hand bookshop in the middle of nowhere and there were a few interesting surprises in it. The book is Printing Design and Layout by Vincent Steer. I’m not sure what date – from indirect evidence it seems to be post WW2 (I thin around 1945-6) and is the […]

  • The world of card-based design tools

    The world of card-based design tools

    Sets or decks of cards – similar to playing cards – are a long-established type of tool to aid designers. One of the earliest examples is The House of Cards created in 1952 by the famous American designers, Charles and Ray Eames. The OU was early in this field with the Meta Cards, produced in […]

  • Smart Cities in the Making

    Smart Cities in the Making

    Many cities across the world are being reconfigured by digital technologies and reframed as ‘smart cities’. However, cities are far from passive contexts in which digital technologies are simply implemented. How smart reworks the social in cities and specifically how it maintains and generates social difference is a key matter of concern. However, social difference […]

  • Disruptive Innovation Festival: global and all online

    Disruptive Innovation Festival: global and all online

    *** Our very own Emma Dewberry live on the Disruptive Innovation Festival at 10:15 on 10/11/17 talking about Design for Longevity: Business as Unusual*** This year’s Disruptive Innovation Festival, ask: What if we could redesign everything for the circular economy? The festival has been an initiative created by THE ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION together with several partners and is […]

  • The Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017 announced today!

    The Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017 announced today!

    Prepare to be inspired by the fantastic designs entered for the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize, which is in partnership with the V&A and the Crafts Council. The BBC website is hosting a range of features and interviews to celebrate craft design and the use of materials and technologies in design. It’s worth a listen. This […]

  • The role of design education in addressing world challenges

    The role of design education in addressing world challenges

    Over the last months, I have been repeatedly involved in conversations around the relation between design education and the world’s challenges. How does design education contribute to dealing with big challenges such as poverty, hunger, people’s displacement or environmental disasters? Some conversations will approach design education as a space for developing the design capacity of […]

  • Design and anticipation

    Design and anticipation

    Anticipation is the ability to act in response to, or in preparation of, a potential future reality. This is a key ability for people and social groups that are involved in design tasks (see Zamenopoulos and Alexiou, 2007; Zamenopoulos, 2012). There is a very interesting conference on Anticipation coming up next week from the 8th […]