Category: Design engagement
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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 […]
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Smart & Green Building Expo Milton Keynes 2018
Where else to host the inaugural Smart and Green Building Expo than Milton Keynes, one of the UK’s smart cities? Milton Keynes is famous for its many smart city initiatives, such as MK:Smart, which developed innovative smart projects including, the MK IoT network demonstrator, the MotionMap city-wide transport information service, the Our:MK platform for community engagement, the […]
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‘It’s OK, to want to be ordinary…’
Recently one of my colleagues, for the purposes of this blog let’s call her Helen, is nearing two notable landmarks in her life. One is her fortieth birthday and the second is her final ophthalmic consultation to register her as blind. For most of her life, Helen has been visually impaired, but she then became […]
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Design thinking to support underserved communities in the North-East of Mexico
Juan Manuel Fernández Cárdenas and Christina Reynaga-Peña from TEC de Monterrey in Mexico organised a week-long workshop on ‘Reducing marginalisation and promoting inclusive education with the mediation of digital technology’ in February 2018. Here is a summary of the workshop. Over 80 participants, including teachers, teacher trainees, researchers, governmental and non-governmental organisations from the North-East of Mexico, […]
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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, Architecture, Photography: Every House on Langland Road
Milton Keynes has just marked the 50th anniversary of designation as one of the UK’s last new towns. The whole place is a remarkable piece of design research with its meticulous plans and radical ideas which have survived, to varying degrees, both in the archive and the built environment. One of the key early objectives of the […]