Between September 2005 and June 2008, as project leader/lead designer, I directed a team of five graduates, all from different design disciplines upon a UCLan post-graduate research project called CityBrand. 

The aim of the project was to give Preston its identity back, to galvanise its inhabitants and attract visitors and much needed private funding. Our research focused on what makes cities special and specifically, how a place’s unique history, heritage and culture could inform the design of its public realm.

The creative process began by making connections and highlighting relationships not seen or thought of before. The process continued by using these connections imaginatively, transforming complex information into simple, coherent and in many cases, tangible, realised design solutions.

The CityBrand project was featured at New Blood, as one of only three films made nationally on the subject of excellence in design education by D&AD of Great Britain.

The following five featured examples, form part of an Outdoor Museum that would direct visitors along a route around the city centre. Each one would depict an interesting and unique fact about a famous person or the city.

Edith Rigby

Outdoor Museum

Leo Baxendale

Outdoor Museum

CityBrand’s original idea, to lay illustrated industrial ceramic paving stones in sequence to reflect a comic, was enhanced when we commissioned a unique, never before seen Bash Street Kids story, conceived especially for the project by the original Beano artist, Prestonian, Leo Baxendale.

In 2007, CityBrand approached Preston’s very own Nick Park CBE, the creator of Wallace & Gromit to develop our idea of creating a life size, interactive work of art featuring the famous duo. From Nick’s original sketch below, a plasticine model was created at Aardman Animations in Bristol and the CityBrand design team visualized it in the favoured location of Preston Railway Station. The proposed site would ensure the bronze statue would be seen (and sat upon) by thousands of passersby everyday.

Me, Li Rui & Gromit, Nick Park and Clare Bracken.

Peel Back Street Furniture

Outdoor Museum

A bench is formed by peeling back the surface layer of the ground to reveal Preston’s historic foundations, set out in a cast metal typographic story. The generic story of the city’s rich industrial past could be told, a unique location specific tale or a personal human story associated with Preston.

Horrocks Bench

Outdoor Museum

A floral pattern from the archives of Preston’s world renowned Horrocks Mill is applied to the steel furniture by a laser engineering perferation process.

Preston Parks

Branding

Other projects undertaken brand the city holistically, for example, park specific characteristics were used imaginatively to create an individual identity for each of Preston’s Victorian parks.

The CityBrand project highlighted that different design disciplines could work together to the benefit of the creative process. With CityBrand’s external funding programme coming to a close and with so many exciting and unique individual solutions still to be realised, it seemed the natural step was to try and find a way of continuing CityBrand’s output.

The first step was to record how successful our interdisciplinary approach to projects had been and then, to write this up as a new type of post graduate design course. A largely practice based course that encouraged interdisciplinary teams working on “live” projects focused on the public realm. The nature of the work would act as a natural conduit to business and employment. It is expected that a more holistic type of designer would emerge, one that had a greater understanding of how design fits into the wider role of industry.

Consequently, I put pen to paper and transformed CityBrand, a postgraduate research unit that gave burseries to successful applicants, into a unique, fee paying postgraduate design course.

MA Transdisciplinary Design was chosen as the course title and the new Masters course was validated in June 2009, with the first students enrolling in September of the following academic year.

A series of A1 sized recruitment posters designed specifically for D&AD New Blood 2010.