A blog about design at the OU.
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PhD Fellowship Opportunities at the Energy DTA
Energy research opportunities at The Open University (OU) through the DTA3 COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship Programme. The OU is a partner on the successful bid for the ‘Extended University Alliance Doctoral Training Alliances (DTA) in Energy, Applied Biosciences for Health and Social Policy called The DTA3 COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship Programme. This is […]
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Learning about design and technology
Learning about design and technology: It is not true – there is such a thing as a free course! Design and technology are increasingly ubiquitous concepts. This is reflected in several recently launched free OpenLearn Courses in areas relevant to engineering, software and industrial design. ——-Find out more TT284 An introduction to web applications architecture An introduction […]
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Getting good social design to happen
Georgy Holden’s post last week got me thinking. Do have a look at it. Georgy made a link between the philanthropic housing activities of the 19th century ‘model village’ builders and the lessons for today with the push for the private sector to build vast amounts of new homes. She is so right that there […]
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Design for (fully) living
In 1887 William Hesketh Lever, a grocer’s son from Bolton, purchased a large parcel of swampy land in Birkenhead with the intention of building a soap factory. That factory was the start of what is now the global company Unilever. William Lever, later Lord Leverhulme, had a strong vision for business, but it is his […]
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Where do creative ideas come from?
‘All designers probably say the same thing, that inspiration is everywhere and in everything. We study the work of great mathematician and designer, Buckminster Fuller and others like him – it leads to new ideas.’ So says lighting designer Ian Cameron. https://camerondesignhouse.com/collections/collection The source of ideas can be fairly general. For example, the Inspiration for […]
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Is it smart to be Smart?
Smart products are elements of product-service-systems which use processors, sensors and communication technologies to collect and communicate data. The most common example is the smart phone which is a multi-functional device that uses its embedded technologies in different ways according to the installed apps, for example as activity tracker, health monitor, shopping assistant, etc. Based […]
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Design Star Methods Day
For the last two years we’ve hosted a research methods day for the AHRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training ‘Design Star‘. This year we focused on exploring the relationship between ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies in our own research … through the making of personal ‘thinking positions’ pyramids and placing them on a landscape describing different paradigms of approaching research, […]
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End of Year 2018 exhibition
Creating an exhibition of Design and Innovation undergraduate students’ work has been one of the most rewarding experiences I had for a while. We called for contributions to an End of Year design exhibition. Having an ‘Annual show’ has a long tradition in other design schools, but we never had one at the OU. This […]
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U101 AL to win British Medical Journal Innovation Award 2018
We are proud to say that Dr Liliana Rodriguez, AL at the Open University and teaching on our U101 module, has received the prestigious British Medical JournalInnovation Award 2018. She took part in a collaborative research project with colleagues from the Brighton and Sussex Medical school. The project was funded by Public Health England (PHE). […]
