Research

Research happens through collaboration across several disciplinary perspectives. These have included graphic design, urban design, architecture, planning, geography, and archival practice, in collaboration with heritage professionals and creative industry practitioners.

Our approach is closely associated with the established field of urban heritage. It has evolved towards a focus on three core areas of research and impact that underpin heritage interpretation, presentation, and representation. These are:

  • graphic heritage means, concerning representation;
  • graphic heritage meanings, concerning interpretation;
  • graphic heritage measures, concerning impact.

The projects featured below provide variable examples of how these are integrated.

View of Shanghai skyline

Repositioning Graphic Heritage

What new perspectives can graphic design contribute to design for urban heritage? How can participatory design approaches enhance urban graphic heritage for greater social cohesion?
Old map of Adelaide

Adelaide’s graphic heritage

How is heritage communicated across various scales of the Adelaide city region? In this project, a graphic heritage perspective is utilised to highlight the contested identity of Adelaide as a quintessential colonial city.
Shop front in Walthamstow

Graphic heritage in Walthamstow

Food’s material and symbolic values are central to cultural heritage. Urban foodscapes are dense in graphic communication, with memories and meanings that connect us with place often triggered by food’s graphic heritage.
Arsenal football ground

Kissing the badge

Football is big business. Yet for most top clubs in Europe and particularly those in the English Premier League, match day income is not the core part of their business. To improve their earning power, clubs increasingly operate as brands.
Centre of Bradford

Design outreach - Bradford

This six-month project to examine the concept of graphic heritage to assess how it might be a helpful tool for UNESCO designations for overcoming sustainable development challenges specific to urban environments and world heritage sites.
Nelson Mandella Square with statue

Memorialising Mandela

What might we expect to learn about a famous person from visiting a place named after them? Is naming an urban place simply an act of commemoration?