Hossein Ghiasvand

What problem have you wanted to work with/find a solution for?

The common misconception is that visual identity of a city is merely about designing a logo, slogan, color palette and promotional campaigns. This is one of the most significant issue to be considered in today’s city branding projects. Including all the stakeholders in city branding process is another challenge which must be highly considered to provide solutions for solving this problem. In this design project I discussed these issues and tried to find a solution for these matter. In its core, it is a critical reflection about city branding activities in different city in the world.

How has the process been?

Getting the people’s minds, perception and emotion about the city was my goal and I tried to use creative tools to facilitate people’s thinking and talking about their experiences. In developing my methodology, I picked tools such as questionnaire, interview, observation and workshop to get a deeper understanding of citizens perception about the city. I tried to gather people perceptions, and ask them to share their experiences. As a city brand is built on the existing strengths of the city and it cannot be limited to a logo, this projects created a platform to identify these strengths with the help of citizens and took steps in solving the challenges of city branding with participation of citizens as much as possible.

What was the result?

My main goal was to develop a participatory approach in which every individuals can share his/her thought and be a part of branding activity of the city. It was a try to replace the topdown approaches in city branding strategies with the bottom-up and give an important role to citizens in the process. I developed a participatory approach based on an application. It is a network of citizens where they can share their everyday life experiences through weekly theme. Through these themes we can have a huge amount of daily life data of citizens which it can be used in city branding.

Who will especially benefit from your project?

Citizens have the most benefit of this design project. They can share their everyday life experiences through weekly theme. These themes can inspire them to pay attention to happenings, moments and all little things in the city that they would never consider during a day. Weekly themes inspired citizens to map out to their own life and remind them to pay attention to the little things. They can uncover warm moments of their everyday life and better calculate aspect of their lives they never thought to.

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