News

"Intrigue, uncertainty and humour" Why work in an Integrated Design Team?

Date: Thursday 28th June 2012
Time: 12:45 for tea, coffee & biscuits, 1pm start.
Venue: First Floor Seminar Room, Design School, Loughborough University.

The task of fracturing Ashford's 'tourniquet-like' ring road needed both a visionary and radical approach. The ring road's grip on the city stymied the physical growth of communities, neighbourhoods, industry and commerce. The project needed to transform and regenerate the ring road-highway into a street, and a street into an accessible, safe and refreshing series of community spaces. Above all, it needed to Break Boundaries.

A multi-disciplinary team of experts set out to break those boundaries. This included:

• Artists
• Highway Engineers
• Landscape Architects
• Lighting Designers
• Traffic Planners
• Urban Designers
• Alongside partners and advocates in both the Local and County Authority and within the ring road's local communities.

The Integrated Design Team delivered an innovative and cohesive 'shared space' scheme, re-designating and re-delineating how vehicles and pedestrians shared the former ring road landscape. In this context, 'shared space' also functions as a metaphor, illustrating how the project team worked together, as an Integrated Design Team, on the creative, functional and pragmatic project components.

During the seminar event, key members of the team will reflect and review their roles in the Breaking Boundaries project. Thus examining, with the benefit of hindsight, the project's successes, failures and, crucially, their experiences of working in an Integrated Design Team.

Please RSVP to art@antoinetteburchill.com

For further details

Speakers (further speakers to be announced shortly)

Chair: Jeremy Hunt, AAJ Press 
Jeremy Hunt is Director of the AAJ Press (Art & Architecture Journal / Press) - a writer and consultant on art and public space creating publications, conferences, web media and films. He studied Art History at Essex University (1976-79) and Goldsmiths' College, specialising in twentieth century British Art, in particular the relationship between artists and architects through 'The Independent Group' and British Art of the 1950's. 

 In 1983 he worked in the East Midlands as one of the first generation of art commissioners developing art for public places. He published and edited the Art & Architecture Journal from 1995-2009 and now concentrates on writing and communications on the subject of public art. 
www.aajpress.com  http://aajpress.wordpress.com

John Atkin, Breaking Boundaries lead artist.
John's role as Lead Artist for Kent County Council's pioneering Breaking Boundaries 'shared space' project has won several major awards and is the subject of widespread critical reach. Embedded within an Interdisciplinary Design Team, John delivered a range of unique Highway designs, reflecting on Ashford's cultural heritage within the contemporary context of innovative urban design. http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/staff/john-atkin.html