Category: Design comment
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Redesigning the construction industry?
Good news, for everyone involved in the design and construction of the built environment: the UK Government is putting aside £72 million to ‘transform the construction sector’. It is doing so through setting up a ‘Core Innovation Hub’ (https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/142/overview). The announcement defines three innovations it wants the hub to focus on: a digitally driven manufacturing […]
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Drawing to remember
Research carried out by Professor Charles Spence, Head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University has found that for most people taking photographs on holiday results in digital amnesia where a scene is taken and then forgotten. In contrast using more than one sense, such as drawing, which involves both vision and touch, can […]
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Pay or Play?
This week the UK government announced a proposal to encourage recycling of bottles and cans by creating a returnable deposit scheme funded by increased prices on drinks. Scotland have already announced plans for such a scheme and the Welsh Assembly are also considering this. Such schemes, for glass bottles, we around from early in the […]
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Greeting Card Design for Mother’s Day
Throughout history and across cultures we have venerated and celebrated motherhood. Particularly the mother’s role in bringing forth and nurturing new life. The first greeting cards were designed by the ancient Chinese and early Egyptians. Much much later in the 20th century, we began to see the design of Mother’s Day cards celebrating motherhood in […]
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Farewell Trevor Baylis -Inventor, Designer and Engineer
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The Leaning Chimneys of Stewartby
Back in the 1930s, the London Brick Company established the largest brickworks in the world across Bedfordshire. Over 2,000 people were employed here at this time. At its peak, there were as many as 162 chimneys, built on the clay soils across Marston Vale, linking 8 villages including Stewartby. Stewartby itself had 32 chimneys each […]
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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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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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Diagrams and design – soft thoughts.
Here is a diagram taken from a recent article in Journal of Cleaner Production which will be familiar with some readers. Are such diagrams useful in designing? Ehsan N et al 2017 Boundary matters: the potential of system dynamics to support sustainability? Journal of Cleaner Production, 140(1) 312-323 I am not talking about sketches of […]