Category: Design engagement
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Moving to Mars
We had our first family-oriented qualification event on Sunday, 23rd of February in London. We went to the Design Museum and made some puppets with our families and visited the ‘Moving to Mars’ exhibition. My daughter loves hedgehogs. So, this is what we aimed for as a puppet. My daughter commented in the video demonstration […]
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Creating a womens’ network
Part of our trip to Mexico in December was focused on a British Council project to aid the creation of a network for women in science and business on the Yucatan peninsula. A series of events was run in conjunction with the Universidad Privado de la Peninsula (UPP) and the Instituto Yucateco de Emprendedores (IYEM) […]
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FabLab Yucatan – prototyping the future together
Ileana (President of the Fab City Yucatán Association), Oscar, and Carlos gave us a tour of Fablab Yucatan when we visited Merida, Mexico in November 2019. You can watch the video of the tour on https://www.facebook.com/728801612/videos/10157850699341613/ (approx. 1h 15min) The Lab first opened as HUBlab in 2015. The vision was to form a creative ecosystem of […]
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Exploring Blackpool and High Street Renewal
Last week I visited Blackpool for the first time, to help facilitate an event with local residents looking at high street renewal. The event was organised by The Glass-House Community Led Design in partnership with our Design Group and Historic England, to collaboratively explore how historic high streets can be reimagined to better serve their […]
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Museum of Brands
We followed a recommendation from an OU tutor, Richard Coles (T317), who has been working as a packaging designer for a long while. Under his guidance, a group of students from the Design and Innovation qualification and other qualifications visited the Museum of Brands in London. We were delighted that Robert Opie, the Founder of […]
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Designing Carbon Reduction in Higher Education
The Open University held the first Climate Emergency Forum (CEF) which was attended by a wide range of stakeholders. The CEF had these respectable aims – bring together staff and students to share initiatives develop an action plan and agree next steps identify a steering group to take forward the suggestions oversee the implementation of […]
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A swiss excursion in minimal design
Visited a couple of Swiss buildings recently which motivated some thoughts on minimal Design. Corbusier designed a lovely lakeside ‘Petite Maison’ for his parents near Vevey, Switzerland. It was built in 1923, to minimal principles (although its appearance is complexified by later cladding). The architectural composition is linear along the lake shore with views to the […]
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Fashion UK – sustainability and ethics
High profile leaders from the Fashion Industry meet with politicians and academics in Westminster on 20 November 2019 to discuss sustainability and ethics in fashion. This conference follows a report from the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee in February 2019. Design is central to meeting industry sustainability goals. It is tremendous that these issues […]
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Playmobil as a design and communication tool
PhD students at the OU are encouraged to engage in ‘research dissemination’, so that we can share our research with lots of different audiences with various knowledge levels. Every year in early June the graduate school holds a Postgraduate Research Poster Competition to give us an opportunity to share our research. As a first year […]
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Designing the 2019 Design Qualification student exhibition
For the second year running, the Design and Innovation Qualification team organised an exhibition of students’ work across its 3 core design modules U101, T217/T218 and T317. The exhibition was designed by 3 student designers: Rukhsana Ali (U101), Patrice Belton (U101) and Kristina Valenkova (T317) and one professional exhibition designer: Dawn Correa (also tutoring U101 […]