A blog about design at the OU.
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Cities of permanent experiments and atmospheres of reception
We have been thinking quite a bit about the effect that urban experiments may have on cities, particularly when sustainability experiments become business as usual. This was inspired by our recently work on an Innovate UK project, On Street Residential Induction Charging (or OSRIC for short). The project involves the deployment of wireless chargers for […]
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The Design Group at TEDx – Part 2: Imagine what’s next… the future of aircraft manufacturing is additive
On 8th November 2019 I participated in TEDx Open University. When I sent off my audition video last summer, I had no idea how much time and effort it would take to develop a 10 minute talk! I applied to speak at TEDx because I was keen to share my research on sustainable manufacturing with […]
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155 card-based design tools
In November 2017 I wrote a Design@Open blog on some preliminary findings of research that James Warren and I were doing on card decks as tools for designers and designing. Since then we have completed our work and published the results in Design Studies (Roy and Warren, 2019). This article is embargoed until late March […]
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FabLab Yucatan – prototyping the future together
Ileana (President of the Fab City Yucatán Association), Oscar, and Carlos gave us a tour of Fablab Yucatan when we visited Merida, Mexico in November 2019. You can watch the video of the tour on https://www.facebook.com/728801612/videos/10157850699341613/ (approx. 1h 15min) The Lab first opened as HUBlab in 2015. The vision was to form a creative ecosystem of […]
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Exploring Blackpool and High Street Renewal
Last week I visited Blackpool for the first time, to help facilitate an event with local residents looking at high street renewal. The event was organised by The Glass-House Community Led Design in partnership with our Design Group and Historic England, to collaboratively explore how historic high streets can be reimagined to better serve their […]
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Digital Twins
‘Digital twins’ are in the headlines this year and I have attended two events focusing on digital twins in the last few weeks. The first was in the context of the built environment and the second in aerospace and it was interesting to compare the approaches. A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical system […]
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Transformative Transport design
Sometimes something happens that represents the tipping point between simply enhancing the design of an existing product or service and when a transformative redesign happens. I am wondering if we are about to hit this for urban transport systems. The modern tram is frequently seen as a core high quality public transport system, but its […]
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Museum of Brands
We followed a recommendation from an OU tutor, Richard Coles (T317), who has been working as a packaging designer for a long while. Under his guidance, a group of students from the Design and Innovation qualification and other qualifications visited the Museum of Brands in London. We were delighted that Robert Opie, the Founder of […]
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Designing Carbon Reduction in Higher Education
The Open University held the first Climate Emergency Forum (CEF) which was attended by a wide range of stakeholders. The CEF had these respectable aims – bring together staff and students to share initiatives develop an action plan and agree next steps identify a steering group to take forward the suggestions oversee the implementation of […]
