Category: Design research
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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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Celebrating a Decade of Strategic Partnership between The Glass-House Community Led Design and the Open University
Guest blog post by Sophia de Sousa, Chief Executive of The Glass-House Community Led Design Last month, I had the immense pleasure of watching my long-time collaborator and now dear friend, Professor Theodore Zamenopoulos, give his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Citizen-led Design at The Open University. Whilst it was an academic lecture about collaborative […]
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The journey to service co-design
“Inside Mum” – The journey to service co-design in parenting education with practitioners, and women who have experience of the Criminal Justice System I first started looking at research with the Open University in Criminal Justice in the late 1990s, when I encountered a powerful reader text by Anne Worrall (1990) about the experience of […]
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Dare to Hope: a box to support creative ageing
As we grow older, the opportunities to keep growing our creative capabilities and participate in social, cultural and economic life are reduced. Research suggests that active and creative living is a key factor for the health and wellbeing of individuals as they are ageing, but also a key factor for the quality of life and […]
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Cross-pollination Resources
Over the last year the Cross Pollination research project, part of the Placed-Based Research Programme hub, worked in several locations to see how the Cross Pollination approach could enable local organisations to enable their own communities. One of the key objectives for this particular research project was to develop ways to cascade and enable cross-pollination […]
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Celebrating the diversity of research in the built environment
A few months ago I took part in a ‘video challenge’ being run by the international, open access journal, Buildings & Cities. The challenge was for PhD students and those who had recently completed their PhDs to explain ‘why their research matters’ in a two minute video aimed at a general audience. The purpose of […]
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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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The inclusive design studio
I have been fortunate to experience diverse studio-based education approaches in different parts of the world and in different modes (hybrid, virtual, community-based, etc.). I position myself as a design education scholar with a particular interest in diversity and the socio-cultural contexts of designing. As a Senior Lecturer in Design at the Open University, I design online studios and […]
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Celebrating our Gurnos
On a lovely sunny Saturday at the end of September, people on the outskirts of Merthyr got together to celebrate the place and community of Gurnos. The celebration was the outcome of several activities in partnership with the Open University in Wales as part of two different projects: the Creu Cyffro Community Renewal Funded project, […]
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John Christopher Jones: In Memoriam – by Nigel Cross
The first Professor of Design at the Open University, the pioneering, internationally renowned and influential design researcher John Christopher Jones died on the 13th August 2022, in London, at the age of 95. John Chris at his 80th birthday party, Hampstead Heath and at the 50th Anniversary DRS conference, Brighton, 2016 (Photos: Robin Roy) Known […]