The Art of Design: Seeing The Bigger Picture

Using words and images referencing nature and culture, this research investigates the process and impact of creating spatial visions for ‘seeing the bigger picture’ in order to inform the transformation of regions. The researcher’s work explores radical mapping as an analytical and artistic tool, which has led to the development of a sequence of case-studies, exhibitions, richly illustrated presentations, publications, new policies, mentoring, student collaboration and an infrastructure of stakeholder engagement. Across this powerful and varied range of outcomes the research has situated a new cohesive and integrated landscape-led approach which transforms the physical materiality, ideas, memories and visions of the future in order to shape the experience we have of place as the social, physical and cultural context of our lives. This research crosses professional and disciplinary boundaries using artistic, landscape and geographical expertise to re-evaluate the assumptions underlying practice-based research inquiry and the relationship between landscape and philosophy. It represents a significant shifting of methodology, away from the dominant scientific/social science paradigm, towards an approach that is deliberately more ambiguous and interpretative. The methods require an understanding of perception as intelligence and define landscape as the relationship a community has with its territory. The research thus seeks to address whether ideas can transform a region, and if so, how? The research has led to an extraordinary number of high-profile outcomes spanning academic and public arenas. This includes peer reviewed papers, numerous exhibitions and developmental publications. In addition, it has informed the policy and ‘landscape-architecture’ thinking used by HS2 in the development of its pioneering West Midlands National Park, which underpins the West Midlands Combined Authority’s current sustainability agenda; directed long-term socioeconomic and environmental regeneration in the Black Country; and informed a UNESCO International declaration. Details of the research and publications are in the Research Catalogue exposition.