News

School of Engineering and Innovation researcher Professor Claudia Eckert was recently invited to deliver a keynote talk at the International Conference and Innovation in Engineering (ICIE) in Prague, where she discussed the challenges and opportunities in combining innovation and durability. One way to make products more sustainable is to make them more durable. However, if well-working products meet consumer needs, there is less scope for innovation. 

Ismay Mummery is a final year PhD student in the School of Engineering and Innovation. Her research considers how to increase garment mending by looking at the drivers, challenges, and opportunities for different communities. She is also the founder of a multi-award winning sustainable fashion brand. 

School of Engineering and Innovation researcher Lisa Bowers is leading efforts to ensure that The Open University is at the forefront of accessible education.

Methods comprise a significant part of the knowledge engineers are taught and that they use in professional practice. However, methods have been largely neglected in discussions of the nature of engineering knowledge.

In their paper Methods as a Form of Engineering Knowledge, Prof Claudia Eckert and an interdisciplinary international group of philosophers, engineers, and computer scientists argue that methods should be seen as a distinct type of engineering knowledge.

Honeycombs have long been known to offer interesting properties, such as low mass-weight ratio, energy absorption, and mechanical and acoustic damping; but historically have been limited in geometry due to manufacturing constraints. Hexagonal honeycombs, like bees make, can be simply manufactured from sheets of material such as cardboard or aluminium. In contrast, triangle-based honeycombs are more difficult to manufacture, for example when used in rocket housings they are cut from large blocks of aluminium, which is wasteful and expensive.

School of Engineering and Innovation researcher Lisa Bowers is co-author on a recent paper which introduces a new approach to citizen science in primary schools. The paper posits that integrating haptic technologies will considerably augment student participation with scientific, environmental teaching and learning tasks. The project joined together a transdisciplinary research team from several academic institutes - the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, and The Open University.

On 8th May 2025, E&I academics Theo Zamenopoulos, Vera Hale, and Katerina Alexiou co-hosted an event with The Glass-House Community Led Design and Historic England, bringing together national bodies working with communities through place-based initiatives.

This month, the BBC science documentary series Rare Earth returns with a fifth series. Academics from the OU STEM Faculty, including the School of Engineering and Innovation, have once again contributed to the production.

Rare Earth is a weekly podcast and radio show which digs deeper into the biggest issues for our planet. Each episode tackles a major story about environment and wildlife, exploring the relationship between humans and the Earth.

Sustainable waste management requires significant increases in the proportion of waste and its components being reused, repurposed, and recycled instead of landfilled. Recent research and regulations have supported growing interest in circular economies, with a significant focus on making waste management processes more cyclic, increasing reuse, and reducing disposal.

Over recent decades, flood risk management has often involved communities adopting decentralised and people-centred approaches. This includes the emergence of property flood resilience, sustainable urban drainage systems and nature-based solutions. As all of these approaches tend to be small-scale and implemented at the household or neighbourhood level, they require increased levels of community involvement to support implementation and stewardship compared to traditional ‘hard engineering’ flood defence strategies such as flood dykes and walls.