Month: July 2020

  • The Challenge of Re-Opening a Community Garden – The Covid-19 Crisis and Access to and Uses of Green spaces in Cities 

    The Challenge of Re-Opening a Community Garden – The Covid-19 Crisis and Access to and Uses of Green spaces in Cities 

    Now that the UK lock-down has been eased, although we observe increasingly local lockdowns being actioned, we can start to look back at what impact the Covid-19 crisis had and continues to have on social life in cities. In this short blogpost, I want to share some initial thoughts on the access to and uses […]

  • 10 years of Connected Communities

    10 years of Connected Communities

    Last week, AHRC released two videos to share insights from its Connected Communities programme which you can view on their homepage. Connected Communities was an innovative cross-council initiative, which brought academics and partners from civil society, local government, the arts, culture and social enterprise to work together to understand the role and impact of communities in […]

  • The Science and Poetry of Messy thinking

    The Science and Poetry of Messy thinking

    This post started out as a few reflections on a few distance design education events I attended recently, where most of the discussions did not centre around online vs face-to-face or technology and IT services. Instead, discussion focused on learning and teaching – basic stuff, like ideas around how to make learning activities engaging (for […]

  • Celebrating Student Work

    Celebrating Student Work

    The OU Design Student Annual Exhibition 2020, launched online on June 25th with an event attended by more than 80 students and staff at which two designers talked, Ben Sippel on Design in Lockdown ( https://www.metalstairs.com) and Tanveer Ahmed on Decolonising Design (https://www.antennebooks.com/product/modes-of-criticism-4-radical-pedagogy ). Unlike most other design schools, the OU exhibition always features work from […]

  • Designing in partnership

    Designing in partnership

    This blog was co-authored by Abbie Jackson, Anna Ward-Stancheva, Georgy Holden, Leo Rees-Evans, Mar Reyes, Nicole Lotz and Rebekah Manston, all Design and Innovation students at the Open University. On June 25th 2020, the third annual exhibition of work of OU design students was launched. Every year, we invite students to design the exhibition together […]