This introductory level OpenLearn study unit looks at the process of design – from assessing the complexity of design as an activity, to exposing the difficulty in making general conclusions about how designers work. You will be able to identify innovation in a wide variety of designed objects and evaluate the impact of this innovation.
Having studied this unit you should be able to: recognise that functional artefacts have had input from a designer, with greater and lesser degrees of engineering input; identify that engineering designers work within constraints of finance, materials properties, desired functionality, human factors, etc.; understand that design exploits models of the product being designed, whether those models are physical mock-ups, computer-based models, or mathematical models which explore an element of the product’s performance; understand how models of the design process are formulated, and how they can be applied to understand the development of a particular product or product family; understand design-related terminology such as innovation, context, uncertainty and style.
The learning unit is divided into 7 parts and takes on average 28 hours to complete.
[1] Design and designing
[2] Design and innovation 1: the plastic kettle
[3] Models of the design process
[4] Conceptual design
[5] Concept to prototype
[6] Design and innovation 3: the Brompton folding bicycle
[7] Conclusions
Author: Janice Friend
Source: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Rights: Copyright The Open University. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.
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