Design FuturesGriffith University

Following discussions with students, an idea for a participatory identity process was developed. Work is submitted in any format (eg. images, video, sound files, text etc.) by a student or staff curator. A custom application collates the work into random collages which are displayed on the website’s home page. These constantly changing images are applied to communication products and disseminated via print, online, environmental etc. Each work is automatically assigned a code that is published with the image, enabling online searching and comments.

Typically, university identity campaigns – whatever their specific communication strategies – present an institutional voice, the voice of a corporate authority. This is reflexive commercial marketing paradigms uncritically applied to social institutions. But this top down communication doesn’t reflect the democratic potential of contemporary creative culture, in fact it is hostile to it. In collaboration with Design Futures’ students and staff, this model is turned on its head. It is the cohort that defines our own identity and publicly projects our culture. This process is not the result of a marketing or branding agency imposing values from above, it exists only through the cohort’s own content and participation.