Designed products surround us all and range from bus tickets to buildings. This unit focuses firmly on usability and the increasingly important phenomenon of people-centred design. It aims to inform consumers of design (i.e., all of us) about this crucial characteristic of design. The unit is derived from the Open University course T211 on Design and... View course on original website...

How are designs turned into products? What resources, materials and methods used and what set of activities that goes under the heading of ‘manufacturing’ ? This unit will introduce manufacturing as a system and will describe some of the many different ways of making products. We will illustrate how the required properties of the materials in a... View course on original website...

This 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. View course on original website...

Why is the way something looks important? Text, colour, images, moving images and sound all interact to produce a user friendly environment within a user interface. This unit will help you understand the effect each software component has on the user and explain how a consistent and thoughtful application of these components can have a significant impact on the ‘look’ of final pro... View course on original website...

Why does the way a page looks influence how we interpret the information it contains? This unit looks will examine how typography and images can be combined to improve literary creativity and allow a document to communicate more readily with the reader. View course on original website...