News

Dr Gareth Neighbour recently presented a paper related to The Remarkable Story of Carbon at Carbon 2025 (The World Conference on Carbon, St Malo, France).

The School of Engineering and Innovation is sponsoring the new flagship event from the Institute of Materials, Mining and Minerals (IOM3) - Materials, Minerals & Mining for People, Places, Planet (M3P3).

Taking place on 11–12 November in Birmingham (UK), it brings together all 22 IOM3 technical communities for a two-day, cross-disciplinary programme designed to support learning, connection, and collaboration via CPD, technical insight, and real conversation.

School of Engineering and Innovation PhD student Houda Khayame recently presented preliminary findings from her case study research “Exploring systemic governance in UK rivers: The ‘wicked’ situation of bathing water designation” at the 69th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in Birmingham (11th – 15th July 2025).

This September, the World Design Congress 2025 is being held at the Barbican Centre, London. The theme of the event is Design For Planet. The Open University is an Activation Partner for this prestigious event, and the School of Engineering and Innovation will be well-represented at the two-day gathering.

The Open University's Research Image of the Month for June 2025 highlighted the research of PhD student Claude Nsobya, based in the School of Engineering and Innovation.

The image and accompanying story can be found here: https://research.open.ac.uk/news/research-image-month-flood-resilience-community-voices-and-panoramic-perspective

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.