A blog about design at the OU.
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Yorkshire Sculpture Park
The Open University is part of a Centre for Doctoral Training, called DesignStar http://www.designstar.org.uk. The centre had organised a Summer School at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park https://ysp.org.uk a couple of weeks back. On the first day, the group of around 20 students and supervisors had a choice to attend either of two sessions led by the […]
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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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Conference Report: Learn X Design 2019
Conference Report: Learn X Design 2019 | Crossposted from https://www.designresearchsociety.org/articles/learn-x-design-2019 The fifth annual DRS Pedagogy SIG Learn X Design conference, Insider Knowledge, was held July 9-12 at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. And the Design Group were represented by both past and present members. The conference hosted 150 delegates from 81 institutions in […]
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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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I installed email notification
I hope everyone is having a great summer! If you’d like to add your email to receive blog post and comment notifications from Open@Design (that is if you are currently not an ‘author’) please send me an email at nicole.lotz@open.ac.uk
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Designing the 2019 Design Qualification student exhibition
For the second year running, the Design and Innovation Qualification team organised an exhibition of students’ work across its 3 core design modules U101, T217/T218 and T317. The exhibition was designed by 3 student designers: Rukhsana Ali (U101), Patrice Belton (U101) and Kristina Valenkova (T317) and one professional exhibition designer: Dawn Correa (also tutoring U101 […]
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Professor Godfrey Boyle
Professor Godfrey Boyle, Emeritus Professor in the Design Group at the Open University, has sadly died. After studying Electrical Engineering at Queens University, Belfast and working as journalist for Electronics Weekly, in the early 1970s he founded ‘Undercurrents’, a pioneering quarterly magazine of ‘radical science and people’s technology’. ‘Undies’ initially came out as a collection […]
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Design Council and the OU Design Group
The Design Council visited the OU last week to talk about their ongoing work on the Design Economy. This work overlaps with our own on design identities and students – rather than asking ‘what is design?’ (and getting into the usual trouble…), it can be useful to ask “What are designers doing?” and “Who is […]
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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 […]
