Category: Design comment
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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 […]
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Tom Karen
Letchworth Garden City Museum has been hosting an exhibition of the work of designer Tom Karen over the past year. It is still on show and worth a visit. Sadly, Tom Karen died recently, aged 96. This exhibition is a chance to catch up on a lifetime of designing. Many iconic contributions came from his […]
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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’, […]
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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 […]
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The Secret Genius of Modern Life
Members of the the Design Group have been working on an OU / BBC co-production called The Secret Genius of Modern Life, a series that uncovers the secrets behind the miraculous technologies of the modern world, revealing the mind-blowing stories behind their invention. Derek Jones and David Sharp were the academic consultants and it’s probably […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]