Developing the team: Why every day is a school day
By Stuart Blayney, Studio Manager
As part of this year’s CPD for the design studio, myself and designers Glen McCormack and Phil Stephenson attended the annual Symposium event held by The Sign Design Society (SDS) and the London Chapter of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) in Holborn, and the inspiration felt was near immediate.
This year’s event was titled ‘Positive Places’ and brought together a range of speakers exploring some of the exciting developments in global wayfinding and placemaking. The subject of ‘Positive Places’ was purposely chosen for its audacious optimism and counternarrative to what is going on in the world today.
The event boasted an interesting and varied mix of presenters, ranging from fine artists talking about the journey of making public art for shared spaces through to the MD of an international place-making company explaining about ‘The 4C’s of place’ – Content, Culture, Community, and Co-creation.
What became apparent from each speaker was that each, in their own way, were putting people first high on their priority list for information gathering, and which was noted as being similar to how we at Fitzpatrick Woolmer approach our interpretation and wayfinding projects.
There were some fascinating takeaways from the presentations. “Research is the work”, Colin Davies, artist at Sum Place remarked, while Ibrahim Ibrahim, of Portland Design said: “There must be a shift from a space-centric to a human-centric approach to place, where placemaking is more about content than it is real estate, and where content is co-created to ensure cultural resonance, and community connection.”
Another memorable moment from the symposium was how engaged everyone was with sustainability and environmental issues – in particular the importance of considerations designers should all be adopting in all new signage schemes. None more so than presented to us by Jessica Rose, environment campaign manager at national charity Business in the Community.
Jessica’s presentation contained a short film that had been produced for a community engagement project close to us here in Kent, and so automatically held our attention. ‘RISE UP RESIDENCY’ was a week-long art mural project and educational programme taking place in September 2022 in Margate, Kent. The initiative was spearheaded by internationally acclaimed artist Louis Masai.
The residency welcomed seventeen local and international artists to stay in Margate and create public art as a means of raising awareness of ocean conservation and the issues caused by plastic in and near our oceans. Their aim was to inspire, unite and empower the community of Margate and its visitors to partake in reducing plastics and respecting the ocean.
As a result of empowering the local community, each ‘beach clean’ now attracts over 60 volunteers and having now held over 110 community beach cleans, these have collected over a whopping 10 tonnes of litter, mostly being plastics that were destined for the ocean.
Though community engagement programmes are not directly related to what we currently do in the design studio, stakeholder engagement is becoming more prevalent in the wayfinding projects we have been winning and having a deeper understanding of a community’s wishes and how this influences wayfinding may well have an impact on what and how we design our schemes going forward.
