Category: Design engagement
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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 […]
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Engaging communities in design decision-making
We live in a time where the role of civil society in dealing with social, economic and environmental issues becomes more and more essential in the face of reduced resources by the local and national government to support and develop innovative solutions to such issues. In our research at the OU we have worked with […]
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Faith buildings and local communities
What is the role of faith buildings in today’s society and how can historic faith buildings be revitalised and re-energised by connecting with their local communities? This is a question we have been exploring for almost 5 years now as part of Empowering Design Practices and in this time we have found many examples of […]
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Fostering Sustainable Practices in Fashion
Finally, sustainability in fashion is being noticed. The fast fashion of the last decades has given us cheap clothes of often doubtful quality, which is fast bought and fast disposed. The cheap clothes is often produced in low wage countries and shipped half across the world just to end up in landfill in Europe and […]
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Engaging children in design
As part of a research project that aims to explore the processes of empowering people to design (www.empoweringdesign.net), the research team has occasionally explored different ways for engaging the children of participating families in the design of community spaces. This typically occurs in workshops and open day events where children of adult participants engage in […]
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Co-designing a Makerspace with the La Campagna-Altamira Community in Mexico
I am just back from Monterrey in the north of Mexico, and can’t wait to share what I have done there. I worked on co-creating a Makerspace with La Campana-Altamira, an impoverished and marginalised community in the otherwise comparably wealthy city of Monterrey. Since the former Mexican president Calderon declared the Drug War, this low-income […]
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The U101 Welcome Pack Incredible Give Away Competition Event Thing
Lola herself has been in touch with the Design Group and asked that we spread the cheer of U101 at this time of year. She has donated a number of U101 Welcome packs to give away to at least 7 lucky recipients. Just look at the creative goodness on offer, each object a portal to […]
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Beyond Buzzwords: the language of collaborative design
In collaboration with our strategic partners, The Glass-House Community Led Design, we recently organised and delivered an event to explore key terms used to describe collaborative design activity: co-design, co-production, participation and community-led design. These terms are used by some people interchangeably, while others assign specific meaning and kinds of practices to each one. To […]
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McGonigle McGrath design process
As part of a tour around design studios in Belfast’s Portview Trade Centre, we visited the award-winning Architecture studio, McGonigle McGrath. Kieran McGonigle explained to us how they work, what principles they follow and what a typical design process entails for them. Kieran highlighted two aspects, in particular, sketching and model making, that inform their […]
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3D printing; What is it good for?
3D printing, technically referred to as additive manufacturing, is often heralded as the manufacturing process of the future. This is because it is a very flexible process, and is able to produce forms that cannot be manufactured using traditional methods. In theory anything that can be represented as a 3D model in a CAD file […]