U101: The Design Thinking Blog

Building Stories

Here are some funny interactive animations of the design thinking of three famous british architects Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Terry Farrell. Nicole Lotz has consulted on the content and design of these animations. They are called Building Stories.

The stories were created in support of the BBC Four series The Brits Who Built The Modern World. It was also inspired by the RIBA season of events  that tell the story of why and how British architecture developed globally from 1750 to the present.

U1dh Course Launch Workshop

Yesterday was the official course launch, where all the OU people who have a stake in the course (LTS, Associate Deans, Media Project Managers, Library Services, Learning and Assessment, Administration Systems) get to hear officially what it will be about, how it will be taught etc. I.e. it was a grilling - maybe light toasting would be a better description - for me.

The meeting is based on the information contained in the REP03 (The Course Specification Plan) which outlines educational context, tuition strategy, media strategy, etc. At the start of the meeting I did a presentation about the course which you can view here:

U1dh Course Launch Presentation

The meeting went well, I think, with many positive comments and lists of additional people to talk to. The next stage is to get the REP03, Course Costings, and REP11 (learning and teaching strategy document) approved. Then they give us the money... then we can move to Brazil.

A Few Ideas...

So, a quick brain-dump from the list of paper:

Engagement with LTS / VLE very important (everyone tells me). Perhaps it would be useful to spend some time in LTS seeing what they get up to?

Brian Eno's cards: Oblique Strategies. These give obscure guidance in creative situations. They are nicely suggestive of a way forward when you are stuck.

Tim Benton's course on History of Architecture and Design (A305), now long out of presentation, has some fantastic text and exercises looking at the modern movement. There are so many parallels with todays Sustainable Design movement that it would be worth having a module on this.

Possible Ideas for titles: Design your Life, Design for Life, etc.

The cultural probe design method would be a good way in for students to find out about other student's/people's lifestyle. We could also ask students to create something in Second Life (a product, a gathering, a system).

If one of the ideas behind the course is to define design we might have a series of related questions: 'what do people need?' 'what is waste?' with associated exercises or projects. Students could take that days newspaper and note down all the uses and contexts of the word 'design': is positively or negatively used? Choose something well-designed and not well-designed and describe why.

An adapting technology exercise: look around you and find something that annoys you, or that is overly complicated. What would you do to improve it? Work out a way of doing it. Reference here might be the TV remote control.

Clearly the manipulation of digital materials will be an important skill to develop. This might include: the ability to edit videos (make stories), to photoshop images (simlulation), to design sound... we could ask students to introduce themselves to each other by making a video (using a mobile phone, camera, or video camera). There is an underlying communicative ability here that is being developed which could be used at the end of a design process: Analysis -> Synthesis -> Communication. It is also called visual literacy of course...

Is understanding of change important? I can think of the ability to understand small and large scale change as an important prerequisite for making interventions. I remember the last chapter of Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn as being useful reference here. Also the novel Ulverton by Adam Thorpe, which is about how a place changes over time.

Team composition and teamwork: an online Myers-Briggs questionnaire to sort the students into groups? I'm sure there must be business school material on this.

The body of students doing the course represent a considerable resource in themselves being regionally diverse (unlike most design students). A significant part of the course could be about understanding this group of people from various design angles.