{"id":6448,"date":"2026-02-24T15:53:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T15:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=6448"},"modified":"2026-02-24T15:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T15:54:10","slug":"the-government-has-decided-to-create-a-university-of-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/the-government-has-decided-to-create-a-university-of-the-air\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Government has decided to create a University of the Air&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>60 years ago on 6 February 1966, Jennie Lee tabled a White Paper to Cabinet titled University of the Air.<\/p>\n<p>Critically, it did not say things like &#8216;We are Open to People, Place, and Methods&#8217;. It didn&#8217;t even use the name The Open University.<\/p>\n<p>But what it did do &#8211; and in only 3 pages &#8211; was design the space of opportunity within which the OU would be designed.<\/p>\n<p>And the document itself, and the interviews Jennie Lee gave, also reveal far more about the design process than only reading the content. In that paper are the scars of 3 years of negotiation, patience, and the slow creation of complex entity.<\/p>\n<p>It also reveals the character and attitude of Jennie Lee when you consider her as a designer of the OU &#8211; not just a politician, project manager, or leader.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the talk on Jennie Lee as a designer given at the end of last year that explores the design &#8216;process&#8217; Jennie Lee went through, and the characteristics and\u00a0 competencies that required, as the lead design of The Open University.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"STEM Freshers&#039;: OpenTalk- Visions Matter\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VTV7kNzVdmE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve written before about Jennie Lee and I freely admit that I am totally biased when it comes to what she achieved (and, especially, how she did this).<\/p>\n<p>So I won&#8217;t repeat it here.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, to mark the anniversary, here&#8217;s the summary of the design process and the qualities required if you consider Jennie Lee as the Lead Design of The Open University.<\/p>\n<h3>The Process<\/h3>\n<p>So, here&#8217;s my version of the real design process of the OU:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><b> <\/b>Start with a vague and unconvincing notion<\/li>\n<li>Wade through the swamp of indifference<\/li>\n<li>Face the Blank page of uncertainty<\/li>\n<li>Endure and enjoy the mess of people<\/li>\n<li>Give it away for others to finish<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Now, that doesn&#8217;t look much like the double diamond or any other design process you might have come across. The reality of a lot of design is that it is a messy, difficult, and convoluted process that rarely matches neatly coloured diagrams.<\/p>\n<p>Procedural diagrams rarely preserve nuance or complexity.<\/p>\n<h3>The Qualities Required<\/h3>\n<p>One of the ways to approach such complexities is to really apply human qualities<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><b> <\/b>Design Shepherd<\/li>\n<li><b> <\/b>Enemy of indifference<\/li>\n<li><b> <\/b>Holder of uncertainty<\/li>\n<li><b> <\/b>Designer of people<\/li>\n<li>Creator of incompleteness<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Again, these are probably not the sorts of skills you usually see in a design job advert &#8211; even though they are exactly the sorts of skills that are most valued by employers (I speak from direct experience here&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p>And maybe this is something that remains a response to the AI challenge in the creative industries &#8211; if designers are anything, they are enablers: of futures, people, ideas, visions, not just thinker or doers alone.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>60 years ago on 6 February 1966, Jennie Lee tabled a White Paper to Cabinet titled University of the Air. Critically, it did not say things like &#8216;We are Open to People, Place, and Methods&#8217;. It didn&#8217;t even use the name The Open University. But what it did do &#8211; and in only 3 pages [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6448"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6455,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6448\/revisions\/6455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}