News

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.  

On the 4th of April 2025, Prof Katerina Alexiou and Prof Theo Zamenopoulos celebrated the conclusion of a six-month project funded by the OU's Open Societal Challenges programme and led in partnership with MK Community Foundation. The project piloted a Community Innovation Hub in Milton Keynes, aiming to support SMEs and ethnic minority businesses. The event was hosted at the OU Business School with support from academic colleagues Fidele Mutwarasibo and Aqueel Wahga.

Work by researchers in the School of Engineering and Innovation has informed recent horizon scans on Transport Innovations and Transport System Resilience by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). POST briefings and horizon scans primarily support the select committees of both Parliamentary Houses to ensure that the best available research evidence and information is brought to bear on the legislative process and scrutiny of Government.