A blog about design at the OU.
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Design Museum: what is a good design?
We did a little experiment. What if we organise a visit to the Design Museum (on a grey and rainy February weekend) and everyone from the Design and Innovation Qualification at the OU is invited to come. Who would come and join us? Twenty-five students, 2 tutors and 4 central academics from across the qualification […]
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Design Bytes
The Industrial Designers Society OF America IDSA has thousands of members and runs design conferences and competitions. It also maintains a website with a large repository of design stories and materials as well as links to external materials on design from interviews with famous designers to new manufacturing methods. Its DesignBytes pages give a great impression of the […]
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Designing successful consumer products
I have always been interested in design, and as a child I was fascinated by the old washing machines, cookers and lamps in London’s Science Museum. As a teenager I wanted to be an architect, but decided to do engineering, which spanned my interests in design and science. This led me to study mechanical engineering […]
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Reflecting on a hundred years of engineering design education
I have always known that my grandfather Thomas Clinch was a railway engineer, but I was only recently given some reports from his engineering degree at Imperial College (1921 – 1923). The first thing I noticed about the reports is how beautifully presented they were – everything written in longhand script, with accurate hand-drawn figures […]
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Will a robot take your (design) job?
As designers, happily embedded in the creative industries, we may feel that our jobs are safe from the looming automation that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will bring to the job market. For example, explore the BBC’s tool for predicting the likelihood that a robot could take your job, and you will find that design […]
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Design education in India and the UK
The Design Group are involved in the early stages of a project looking at design education in India and the UK and how further ties might be generated in these areas. The next series of workshops and visits will take place at the end of January 2018 (full report to follow!). But in the meantime […]
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EqualBITE – Gender Equality in Higher Education
Over the past 2 years I’ve been working with the original BITE team (Judy Robertson and Alison Williams) and colleagues at Edinburgh University (Lara Isbel and Daphne Loads) to produce EqualBITE: Gender Equality in Higher Education. (PS It’s available FREE to download from the publisher’s website (so stop reading this and go get it now!): […]
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Design, Architecture, Photography: Every House on Langland Road
Milton Keynes has just marked the 50th anniversary of designation as one of the UK’s last new towns. The whole place is a remarkable piece of design research with its meticulous plans and radical ideas which have survived, to varying degrees, both in the archive and the built environment. One of the key early objectives of the […]
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Creativity and collaboration as a means to engage women in engineering?
Last week I attended Inside Government’s “Promoting Women in STEM” forum in Manchester. It was great to spend a day with like-minded people, discussing the challenges associated with achieving greater gender diversity in STEM related jobs and education. Helen Wollaston, Chief Executive of the Women in Science and Engineering campaign (https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/ ) highlighted the leaky […]
