Category: Design education
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Ensuring effective user input in design
Stephen Potter and Lisa Bowers Here are a couple of perspectives on how we can engender effective user input in design – one being the experience of doing this as part of three major research projects, and the other in terms of design teaching. Firstly, the research examples. A good many years ago Steve Potter […]
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Shifting the design curriculum
First, a note on the accompanying pictures of constructions by two distinguished woman artists, Mary Martin and Gillian Wise. Sadly Gillian succumbed to C19 in April this year. Mary Martin belonged to the previous generation. Gillian’s public artwork at the Barbican, on the staircase down to the cinema, may be familiar from OU London […]
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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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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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OU Design Summer School 2020 – Week 2 (and mostly 3 if I’m honest…)
OK, so in the best traditions of being an OU student: life got in the way of what I wanted to do; I realised that what I wanted to do was probably a bit, and I failed to meet my own deadlines… But part of being an OU student is that with these difficulties come […]
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OU Design Summer School 2020 – Week 1
A few of us are working on an OU Design Summer School this year and we already have a great bunch of students working on this. It’s a bit of an experiment in terms of trying to get a community of learning going with a whole range of individual learning goals. I’ll blog separately about […]
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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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Designing in partnership
This blog was co-authored by Abbie Jackson, Anna Ward-Stancheva, Georgy Holden, Leo Rees-Evans, Mar Reyes, Nicole Lotz and Rebekah Manston, all Design and Innovation students at the Open University. On June 25th 2020, the third annual exhibition of work of OU design students was launched. Every year, we invite students to design the exhibition together […]
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Using remote and onscreen laboratories in online learning
As many Universities need to quickly move their learning online during the current coronavirus crisis, we have received many questions about our remote and virtual laboratories. This blog collects together useful information about our OpenSTEM Labs and provides links to online resources. This blog is a working document and was last updated on 20th November […]
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Editorial: Ed Tech defining design curriculum
(This is a cross post fromthe #DistanceDesignEd blog: http://distancedesigneducation.com) If you’d asked me ‘What drives your design curriculum?’ a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have said Zoom… I’ll shortly have to add a whole list of other technologies, services and ed-tech that are emerging as “class leaders” (That was a satirical pun, by the way). […]