Category: Design comment
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Why is design education white?
UK Black History Month is drawing to an end and this year, in particular, with all of the events that led to Black Lives Matter protests I have, once again, found myself reflecting on the ethnocentric nature of design teaching. The teaching of design in western culture is based on a narrative of design which […]
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Necessity is the mother of invention
In the Socratic dialogue ‘Republic’, Plato famously wrote: “our need will be the real creator” (Wikipedia.org, 2020) which was moulded over time into the English proverb ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. Having read multiple articles of inventions and innovations in medicine, technology, or supply chains over the last 6 months, more than once a […]
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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 […]
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A rose by any other name…
If the prevailing brand culture is a reliable indicator, then society at large is seemingly obsessed with names. Products, including electronics, fashion, food, etc., are bought because of the name slapped on them, often without much more thought. And, it often seems that political discourse and public debate suffers from a similar affliction, where complex […]
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Reflections on participatory design at the OU- in a Design Emergency
There are a few advantages that stem from the current pandemic. As well as momentary improvement in air quality and watching wildlife re-occupy some urban environments, conferences that previously we would have had to travel to, can now be joined on a mobile phone. This opens up many possibilities – conversations taking place across the […]
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Where do you test an innovation? – optimising under constraints
In this blog entry we will discuss the selection of sites for deploying urban innovation (for example, for demonstrators, living-labs or technical trials), sharing some thoughts that arose in response to developments in a real-life project we are supporting. Our work in the project reminded us that site selection is not trivial- context matters for […]
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Corbusier on my mind: Design thinking and post-covid living.
Ever since we have been singing a double Happy Birthday during our 20 second hand-washing rituals at every available washbasin, Le Corbusier has been on my mind. I had previously thought he must have had some rather paranoiac tendencies born of a childhood discomfiture that made him feel it necessary to have sinks throughout his […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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An ecological turn
As is the usual way of things for me, it was a couple of days before the abstract deadline that I clocked this conference in Bologna next January: The Ecological Turn. Design, architecture and aesthetics beyond “Anthropocene”. A key question they ask and describe is: ‘How does the ecological thinking affect architects, designers and the […]