Category: Design for sustainability
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Food, shelter and re-designing home
As a new resident in Milton Keynes, I’ve brought along my decades-long curiosity about how people live day to day and how they organise themselves in different places and cultures to meet needs for food and shelter. Since neither can be guaranteed for all people anywhere in a world of deepening inequality, designers committed to […]
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Lessons from a Santaless Sleigh
Having been asked to provide a Design Blog just ahead of Christmas, I wondered how I might combine this yuletide timing with my design research. I have been working on both research and teaching pieces that explore the product, service and system design impacts of emerging electric and autonomous vehicle technologies. That’s not very Christmassy. […]
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Presenting Futures Literacy to the Scottish Government
One of the things we get to do now and again as academics is to speak to governments and politicians in policy areas we are interested in. This year, the OU in Scotland contributed to the Royal Society of Chemistry event Science and the Parliament event. This brings together scientists, business, politicians, and government to […]
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Contemplating the Future of Public Transport
Miguel Valdez and Matt Cook and I have been asked to write an article for The Conversation on ‘The Future of Public Transport’ and I am grappling with the draft text at this very moment. It’s not that we haven’t been doing very relevant research on the design of transport systems and their implications, but […]
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Teaching ‘Climate Creativity’
A few months ago, I was invited by Kathmandu University as a guest lecturer to run a workshop on Climate Creativity for their final year BA students in Design and Fine Art. The three-week-long workshop was part of their Studio Practice module and through a practice-based approach aimed at generating reflection on the relationship between […]
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Hexagonal Living
A small group of houses always intrigued me as I hiked past them with my children on the way to birthday parties on the north side of Leamington Spa. Set back from the road, and almost hidden by numerous trees, they still managed to stand out; an experiment from another era. I was thus rather […]
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Designing Intelligent Mobility
This week I received a long-awaited early Christmas present. My Design Group colleagues, Matthew Cook, Miguel Valdez, James Warren and I had written a chapter entitled Towards an Intelligent Mobility Regime in the second edition of the Elsevier book Intelligent Environments. As often happens for a major internationally co-authored publication, this has been almost […]
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Governing sustainable urban innovation: navigating the generic and specific.
In many UK towns and cities the search for responses to climate change is framed by extant urban fabrics and thus favour incumbent technologies and actors associated with these. For example, road networks which favour motorised vehicles have almost inevitably directed sustainable transport innovation toward electric vehicles produced by established vehicle manufacturers. Indeed, rendering transport […]
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Design@50 – Design in a Time of Climate Emergency
The latest Design@50 event focused on the topic Design in a Time of Climate Emergency, featuring reflections and discussion between Prof Stephen Peake, Dr Emma Dewberry, Dr Alessandra Campoli and Dr Derek Jones. The event also featured archive footage from the first Open University course that introduced design, connecting it to far broader issues around […]
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What is the problem with solar thermal panels?
In my research on carbon reduction from heritage buildings, visible renewables such as solar panels are interesting. Quite a lot of the heritage conservation community isn’t necessarily convinced by solar panels on the roofs of heritage buildings and there’s been lots of research in various places to consider how to integrate solar PV sensitively with […]