Author: Stephen Potter
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The designerly dance of the electric vehicle chargers
Just before lockdown, I and my colleagues Matt Cook and Miguel Valdez were involved in a research bid in response to an Innovate UK call to address the problem of on-street charging for electric vehicles. EV take-up had been predominantly by people who could charge their cars in their drive or garage. For others, charging…
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1974 and all that……
I am writing this blog on the 1st October 2024. For me, this is an odd sort of anniversary, for it was on 1st October 1974 (i.e. exactly 50 years ago) that I formally joined the Open University. I know there are others still present in our Design Group who preceded me (Robin Roy, Dave…
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Back to the Future: can we nurture transformational design?
A few months ago, I was asked by the journal of the Town and Country Planning Association to write a short article as part of the TCPA’s 125th anniversary. Back in 1898 the TCPA was instrumental in promoting the Garden Cities/New Towns concept and today remains a forum for more radical thinking in urban and…
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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.…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…