Category: Design research
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Looking for a PhD in Design?
The Open University is part of the AHRC funded Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership. The deadline for these PhD applications is the 8th January 2020. Further information on eligibility and details of the OOC studentships can be found via the OOC link. For information on OU Design project and research areas of interest, explore our Blog Research pages.…
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Design Revolutions? IASDR 2019
The IASDR2019, a biannual conference on design research, organised by the International Association of Societies for Design Research, brought together a truly international group of researchers and designers. This year’s theme ‘design revolutions’ steered some discussions around design and change. I asked myself: As we are living in a more and more chaotic and rebellious…
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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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Additive Manufacturing – helping to reduce waste in aircraft production
If you’ve read all the hype about 3D printing in recent years, you would be forgiven for thinking that we should all be driving around in 3D printed cars and 3D printing our own furniture by now. Of course, in reality any new manufacturing process takes time to move into production, and after the hype…
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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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What’s new in aircraft design?
This week I attended the Royal Aeronautical Society 6th Aircraft Structural Design conference (https://www.aerosociety.com/events-calendar/6th-aircraft-structural-design-conference/) hosted at ‘We the Curious’ in Bristol. The conference aimed to address the challenges faced by designers of next generation aircraft, including environmental constraints, advanced manufacturing and materials as well as new design approaches. Smart and efficient mobility with reduced environmental impact…
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Envisioning Futures of Design Education
Do you know how design should be taught in the future? Our recent paper in the journal Dialectic reports on a workshop we held with a group 6 design educators and 40 international participants to explore the future of design education. To spark off the discussion, the 6 design educators presented 4 provocative future…