Category: Design comment
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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 […]
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Design and social responsibility
There has been a growing recognition of the ethical and social responsibilities designers face, particularly within the design research community. Many of our current PhD students choose to grapple with problems or questions that affect society more generally, most notably sustainable production or sustainable living, as well as issues of representation, equality, justice and democratisation. […]
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Smart and Modern Materials
“We may not yet have the flying car that science fiction promised us,” says Catarina Mota (TEDGlobal 2012). “But we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.” In this TED Talk video Moto shows some interesting examples. The notion of […]
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Paper folding
I am fascinated by the folding design of pop-up books. I recently bought a pop-up card on a market and out of interested I asked the maker how they do these cards. He said: “I use Photoshop to create the designs and then laser-cut them”. I wondered though if there really was no analogue design process involved at […]
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A bit of design manual history!
Found this little gem in a second hand bookshop in the middle of nowhere and there were a few interesting surprises in it. The book is Printing Design and Layout by Vincent Steer. I’m not sure what date – from indirect evidence it seems to be post WW2 (I thin around 1945-6) and is the […]
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The world of card-based design tools
Sets or decks of cards – similar to playing cards – are a long-established type of tool to aid designers. One of the earliest examples is The House of Cards created in 1952 by the famous American designers, Charles and Ray Eames. The OU was early in this field with the Meta Cards, produced in […]
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Smart Cities in the Making
Many cities across the world are being reconfigured by digital technologies and reframed as ‘smart cities’. However, cities are far from passive contexts in which digital technologies are simply implemented. How smart reworks the social in cities and specifically how it maintains and generates social difference is a key matter of concern. However, social difference […]