A blog about design at the OU.
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A bit of design manual history!
Found this little gem in a second hand bookshop in the middle of nowhere and there were a few interesting surprises in it. The book is Printing Design and Layout by Vincent Steer. I’m not sure what date – from indirect evidence it seems to be post WW2 (I thin around 1945-6) and is the…
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The world of card-based design tools
Sets or decks of cards – similar to playing cards – are a long-established type of tool to aid designers. One of the earliest examples is The House of Cards created in 1952 by the famous American designers, Charles and Ray Eames. The OU was early in this field with the Meta Cards, produced in…
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Smart Cities in the Making
Many cities across the world are being reconfigured by digital technologies and reframed as ‘smart cities’. However, cities are far from passive contexts in which digital technologies are simply implemented. How smart reworks the social in cities and specifically how it maintains and generates social difference is a key matter of concern. However, social difference…
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Design and Culture
This week the Design Museum in London hosted a Design School Summit, “Design School and the Cultural Turn”, reflecting on the relationship between design schools and the cultural sector, and in particular, design museums. The event comprised a series of speakers from Europe and the USA questioning how curatorial practice should be affected and influenced…
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Disruptive Innovation Festival: global and all online
*** Our very own Emma Dewberry live on the Disruptive Innovation Festival at 10:15 on 10/11/17 talking about Design for Longevity: Business as Unusual*** This year’s Disruptive Innovation Festival, ask: What if we could redesign everything for the circular economy? The festival has been an initiative created by THE ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION together with several partners and is…
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Designing Sustainable Higher Education Teaching Models
The Open University takes sustainability seriously! In addition to establishing carbon reduction measures to meet Government targets, the OU is interested in how the design of different higher education (HE) systems impacts on the environment. How do the distance education systems used by the OU, as a leading provider of creative open learning, compare with conventional campus-based…
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The role of design education in addressing world challenges
Over the last months, I have been repeatedly involved in conversations around the relation between design education and the world’s challenges. How does design education contribute to dealing with big challenges such as poverty, hunger, people’s displacement or environmental disasters? Some conversations will approach design education as a space for developing the design capacity of…
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Design and anticipation
Anticipation is the ability to act in response to, or in preparation of, a potential future reality. This is a key ability for people and social groups that are involved in design tasks (see Zamenopoulos and Alexiou, 2007; Zamenopoulos, 2012). There is a very interesting conference on Anticipation coming up next week from the 8th…
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There is more to methods than a good idea
Designers have mixed feelings about methods. Christopher Alexander, the architect and design theoretician said “If you call it, ‘It’s a Good Idea To Do’, I like it very much; if you call it a ‘Method’, I like it but I’m beginning to get turned off; if you call it a ‘Methodology’, I just don`t want…
