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| T211 design and designing | ||||||||
Steve Garner is the Course Team Chair for the Open University’s second level course ‘Design and Designing’ (code T211). Information on this appears below or you can visit the T211 website by clicking here. For many years the Open University has offered ground-breaking courses on design. T211 is the latest addition offering an insight into activities and principles underpinning the creation and development of a wide range of designed products. The course team have developed this course for those who want to know what goes on behind the scenes of modern product design – especially in those companies aiming at mass manufacture and consumption. It uses examples drawn from very recent product development and contrasts these with design ‘classics’ from earlier eras. The subject is a broad one including, for example, consumer products,
transport, furniture, fashion and graphic design. Questions such as
'why are products like they are?' and 'could they be better?' are starting
points for inquiries into creative techniques, user requirements, materials,
and manufacturing. |
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| Students will be exposed to the principles and practices of designing today and they will become involved in design activity including sketching, model-making and the use of computer based resources. Design and Designing will allow you to acquire knowledge of successful and innovative products as well as assist you to develop basic design skills. The course DVD supports a range of innovative activities for you to work through. | ||||||||
The course has been written to appeal to a wide market - from interested consumers of design to those practising as designers in business and industry. If you are already a designer, the course will give you an understanding of general design principles and will allow you to see and compare their application in various design fields. People encounter designed products every day, from bus tickets to buildings. We travel on, read, wear and even eat products that have been designed. Much design is associated with mass-market production, for example the CD players or kitchen gadgets that many of us own. But there are also specialised design services that can result in one-off or low volume items such as a Formula One racing car, a solar-heated building or a wedding dress. |
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| Design and designing are significant aspects of our world’s culture and economies. Improvements to existing products and the generation of innovative new products are seen as essential to forward-looking companies and on a wider scale, to national economies. New products can also improve human well-being, for example in the fields of healthcare, education, and food production. New understanding of, for example, the environment has revealed the vital importance of satisfying our needs and wants in ways that are environmentally sustainable. This is one way that design has implications for the global environment and our wider society as well as the direct users and producers. | ||||||||
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The profession of designer can be difficult to identify because of the wide range of contexts in which designers are found and because of their interaction with other professions such as materials science, management or marketing. People earn their living as designers of web pages, shoes, theatre sets, air conditioning systems, cornflakes packets and aeroplanes. To list all the different types of designers could take up several pages! However, they share a common feature – designing as a profession is relatively young. While the human ability to shape the world around us may be traced back many thousands of years to our early ancestors, professional designing is a much more recent phenomenon that has its origins in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century onwards. Today design and designing has, in some contexts, become global and highly computerised. The design of a passenger aircraft such as the Airbus is an international collaborative affair involving teams distributed over many countries. In this example it’s likely that the design, modelling and communication will be conducted almost entirely using computers. |
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| Other industries remain
far more traditional, displaying design procedures and techniques that
are a legacy of earlier practices. The vast majority of modern design
practice reveals that we are at an important watershed in our culture,
as we seek to integrate traditional practices with new opportunities.
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The course seeks to develop knowledge of the design and designing of others and to this end students are exposed to a wide variety of examples of design practice. This is enhanced by hands-on activities which develop basic skills and abilities for designing and which are assessed via a number of simple design tasks. For more information on this course click here. |
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