Eddie Norman
Eddie Norman is Emeritus Professor of Design Education at Loughborough Design School (LDS), UK. He joined Loughborough University in 1984 after careers in secondary education and as a (welding) research engineer. He arrived in what was then the Department of Design and Technology with the role of teaching technology to future designers and design teachers. Establishing the knowledge content of both undergraduate design programmes and secondary design education are ill-defined tasks. The technological knowledge base is evolving, and remains the subject of on-going national and international debates. Successfully teaching and researching in these areas requires, therefore, constant participation in and contribution to these debates and consequential changes.
Eddie was the Co-Director of the IDATER Conferences from 1998-2001 and worked in partnership with the Design and Technology Association in helping these conferences develop into their Education and International Research Conferences for which he was the Editor from 2002-2009. In parallel he helped initiate the IDATER Online conferences that explored particular issues. He has been Editor of Design and Technology Education: an international journal since 2005, and worked to establish the online research hub for design education (www.dater.org.uk). He was leader of the Design Education Research Group at Loughborough Design School. All of these activities concern support for the development of the on-going conversations that are essential to research in this area. Establishing LDP is a further step along this road.
He is well known for being one of the co-authors of Advanced Design and Technology (1990) which was written to support 16+ syllabuses and sold around 30000 copies in the UK and internationally. Eddie is a partner in the related musical instrument innovation project Cool Acoustics. This started as a case study exploring the experiential nature of design knowledge in Owain Pedgley’s PhD (1999) through the design of polymer acoustic guitars, but took on a life of its own (developing into the University spin=out Cool Acoustics). He has since supervised a further 6 related PhDs and, once the work of establishing LDP is complete, Eddie intends to write a book based on his PhD research and with contributions from his research students.
