Winterhouse Institute
The Winterhouse Institute focusess on non-profit, self-initiated projects that support design education, as well as social and political initiatives. What the …
58 Posts
Education
Storytelling for Designers
As a design educator I watch and read a lot of project presentations. I worked out the other day that I must have seen at least 2,000-3,000 student projects in …
Students, Ideas & Prototyping
While perusing Nicolas Nova’s post on Prototyping session with post-its and cardboard at EPFL I followed his link to Stickers on Boxes, a …
Without Design Methods, I Feel Like I Am Cheating
Without Design Methods, I Feel Like I Am Cheating - another cracking post from Jon Kolko. This one is close to my heart because I teach design methods on …
Entrepreneur designers in final form
Entrepreneur designers in final form - Liz Danzico has posted a thorough set of links to SVA’s IxD MA (@svaixd) brilliant course (in Europe we would say …
On The Value of Tinkering
On The Value of Tinkering is a thoughtful piece by Jeff Howard on the issues of teaching service design: An entire generation of web designers have bootstrapped …
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi, if you haven’t already heard, is an ARM GNU/Linux box for $25. It is a roughly credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a …
Coursekit
Coursekit is a free online learning management system. I’ve used a lot of the heavy duty, clunky systems over the years, such as Blackboard, WebCT and …
End User Development and more from Interaction-Design.org
Mads Soegaard and his wife Rikke Friis Dam have been hard at work over at their Interaction-Design.org site, a free and well put together resource of …
Design Research - A Failure of Imagination?
Have design education and design research failed to fire up the imagination in public discourse? I believe so and I believe the STEM (Science, Technology, …
Simon Rattle on Education
“We have been educating people for many years to be a certain type of person. We have been educating for a society that maybe is gone. We need more and …
Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity
(Picture from Aquent’s E-Fail service) Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for …
Higher Education is about to crash and burn, says Seth
I couldn’t help but agree with Seth Godin’s summary of the coming melt-down in higher education – it’s an almost perfect echo of the themes I …
Creative Waves - COTEN - Call for Participants
When it comes to thinking about higher education designers – or perhaps just design academics – seem to suddenly forget everything they know. We teach the value …
PaperC - Replacing the Library Photocopier
A recently launched service in Germany called PaperC (Twitter: @Paper_c) looks like it might become a pretty handy resource for students and researchers. It is …
Don Tapscott on the Demise of the University
Don Tapscott has a piece in Edge today called The Impending Demise of the University. In it he takes the same line that I have been for some time in Designing …
Sir Ken Robinson talk at the RSA
The RSA have now added a link to download Sir Ken Robinson’s talk that he gave there last week called ‘The Element’ – “the point at …
Exploring Near Field Communication with Touch
A selection of RFID tags from Timo’s Flickr set. Touch is a research project examining Near Field Communication that enables connections between mobile …
Art is the tonsils of education
I interviewed the renown fantasy illustrator, John Howe, for Desktop last week. I had a great chat with him and he talked about design and art education, some …
Designing Education's Future
I gave a presentation yesterday at Northumbria University’s School of Design’s staff conference called Designing Education’s Future: online, …
Google isn't making us dumb, but 'smart' is changing
It started with Asi’s comments on Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? article. Forty-five minutes later I had Googled through …
Collabor8 - Creative Waves 2008
The Omnium Project will be running another global online creative collaboration project under the Creative Waves banner from 28th April - 20 June, this time …
Parents to be educated about the Interweb
There’s a well-balanced piece from Patrick Wintourin the Guardian today about parents being shown how to protect their children online. It reports of a …
Creative Play helps children's self-control
There’s an interesting piece about Creative Play on NPR at the moment that looks at a school running the Tools of the Mind programme. One of the findings …
OLPC - I take it all back
Some will argue that I’m weak-willed, but I have made a 180-degree change of opinion on the merits of the One Laptop Per Child project thanks to Tom …
iPlay - interactivity without the flab
Chris just posted an interesting find called the iPlay. It’s basically an interactive playground frame game, which means that children have to run around …
Moving Between Consulting and Academia
Jon Kolko’s article, Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire: Life lessons from consulting to academia, and back again over at Core77, was a particularly …
OLPC versus Nintendo DS
Alexander Stojanovic makes an interesting comparison between the Nintendo DS and the OLPC. Having bought both for his five year-old daughter at Christmas he has …
Social Learning Masterclass
A few of weeks ago I presented at a Social Learning Masterclass at Northumbria University to an invite from Stephen Farrier from the e-Learning Innovations …
Podcast of Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education
If you have been missing the sound of my voice (or have no idea what my faltering, mumbling sounds like) the podcast of my seminar at Urban Learning Space about …
What is education worth?
Interesting piece in the Guardian about a new (but already out of date) British Council report (PDF link) on what education is worth to the UK. I’ve …
Creative Collaboration & The Future of Education
I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality …
Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education Seminar
I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really …
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design Opens
A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready …
The Dramatic Impact of the 'Silent Revolution'
I’m very chuffed to see that ChangeThis selected my thoughts on education to be part of their manifesto the Dramtic Impact of The Silent Revolution. …
Zach Lieberman interview on Open Frameworks
There’s an interesting interview with Zach Lieberman by Karl Willis on the Window.nz website. Lieberman talks about his work on the Open Frameworks …
How children use the Internet
I found Richard Sarson’s piece, The Kids Are Alright Online, over at the Guardian interesting today. He interviews children about their internet usage and …
Human Computer interaction in Sci-Fi
I added the link to Michael Schmitz’s Human Computer interaction in Science Fiction Movies to my del.icio.us account a while ago when one of my students …
Reclaiming the Role of Designers
I wrote some thoughts about the life of a creative person for my students a while ago, and recently commented on Rick Poynor’s article about the Soul of …
Interview on WorldChanging
A quick pointer to an interview about the Creative Waves VIP Project with Rick Bennett and I on the very excellent WorldChanging.com. If you’ve been …
Omnium software released as Open Source
Last night the new v4.0 Omnium software that runs all of the Omnium projects, such as the Omnium Creative Network and the forthcoming Creative Waves 2007 (as …
Periodic Table Table
Theodore Gray now has a whole range of the most beautiful Periodic Table posters for sale. Gray is well known for his wooden Periodic Table, erm, table. But …
Creative Waves 2
Omnium, the research group that I am part of (now online) in Australia, has just launched its next ‘Creative Waves’ global e-learning project …
Art Haus
This skit from on a pretentious Big Brother-style ‘art haus’ full of pretentious artists (with German accents) had me chuckling. I have seen a …
Regine comes to the Bauhaus
I’m delighted that the very brilliant and extremely well-connected Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com is giving a talk at the Bauhaus on …
Light Tracer wins Tokyo TDC Award
I’m a bit late with this announcement due to the holidays, but I’m very happy to see that an ex-student of mine, Karl D. D. Willis won the …
The Omnium Blog
I’ve written before about my work with the Omnium Project and the Omnium Creative Network, but it has been needing another home… My colleagues from …
Analogue In, Digital Out
I just read Brendan Dawes’s new book, Analogue In, Digital Out, in one day. A day when I was teaching all day too. I even stayed up late to finish it. …
onedotzero MTV Bloom
onedotzero and MTV Europe are running a competition called Bloom in a bid to find fresh creative talent from across the globe. They’re looking for …
Googlemap of Design Books
Markus Dressen has laid out a selection of his favourite books and created a Googlemap of them. Most of them are design and art books and provide an interesting …
Bauhaus Blog
Not really a post that may be of interest to lots of you, but I have started a new blog for those of you who are/will be my students from the Bauhaus (or anyone …
Starting as Gastprofessor at the Bauhaus
I’m off to Weimar tomorrow to start a six-month stint as Guest Professor “Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in …
Online Educa Berlin 2006 workshop
My colleagues and I from The Omnium Project will be conducting a workshop at the Online Educa 2006 Conference in Berlin on the 29th November and it will be …
Vote for my manifesto
Having spent a long time thinking about and writing the Re-imagining Higher Education essay I am trying to get it published as a Change This manifesto. So, if …
Cambridge University prove their stupidity
You don’t have to be stupid to be a Don here, but it helps. I really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s article in the Education Guardian regarding Cambridge …
Re-imagining Higher Education
Recently I have been giving much thought to the structure and issues that most of us in Higher Education have been struggling with for several years. There are …
The Play Ethic and Sustainability
For a very long time now (since 2005 in fact), Pat Kane’s book, The Play Ethic has been on my Amazon Wishlist (hint, hint) along with several other books …
Perceived value in creative industries
I’m embroiled in an interesting debate about the perception of value of creativity versus (in this case) lawyers over at Greg’s Blog. I won’t …