FreeState

01/11/2018

Over the past few months, we’ve had several conversations with planners and entrepreneurs in Melbourne, London and San Francisco interested in 'innovation clusters', which in a nutshell describes the creation of live places specifically designed to generate and drive knowledge capital. This is a focus for many sectors, is generally specific to city-size placemaking, and is especially interesting for its championing of social capital over pure real estate.

As a recent published New London Architecture (NLA) research paper Knowledge Capital: Making places for education, innovation and health and its excellent accompanying exhibition so beautifully illustrates, London is uniquely positioned as a world leading knowledge economy centre. Its extraordinary network of hospitals, universities and research centres and the fact of it being a significant player in the so-called knowledge golden triangle (which includes Oxford and Cambridge) are the key reasons as to why. Home to a knowledge cluster that includes the Francis Crick Institute, the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, the UCL Cancer Institute, the British Library, Google and Deep Mind, it is proud proprietor of a £3.7 billion research and development economy, one which makes provision of a million plus jobs. Early predictions as to the true value of ‘eds and meds’ as a key economic driver for the future city have been remarkably prescient.

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Over the past few months, we’ve had several conversations with planners and entrepreneurs in Melbourne, London and San Francisco interested in ‘innovation clusters’, which in a nutshell describes the creation of live places specifically designed to generate and drive knowledge capital. This is...

15/10/2018

Change, the future and how best to prepare is top of every strategist’s mind, not least the university educationalist, for whom the world of the student experience is fast becoming something of an obsession. And rightfully so, though a word of caution: when recently asked by a UK-based university as to what we thought the key change drivers would be, and how best to plan for them, I was reminded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ championing not of change, but rather of what is going to stay the same.

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Change, the future and how best to prepare is top of every strategist’s mind, not least the university educationalist, for whom the world of the student experience is fast becoming something of an obsession. And rightfully so, though a word of caution: when recently asked by a UK-based university ...

27/09/2018

In 1968, the literary theorist Roland Barthes published a short and incendiary essay Death of the Author, in which he argued that the intentions of the author ought to be separated from interpretations of the text. The author, he says, ‘is born simultaneously with the text, and is no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends the writing.’ There is no ‘secret, ultimate meaning’ to the text. Returned to the role of the shaman-poet, the author is merely the ‘performer’, a conduit for language, a ‘tissue of citations’, the result of countless cultural influences. This ‘space of many dimensions’ resists deciphering, cannot be penetrated, and is collected in not the author or the critic, but in the reader, whose experience – feel, interpretation – of the text is all that really matters.

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In 1968, the literary theorist Roland Barthes published a short and incendiary essay Death of the Author, in which he argued that the intentions of the author ought to be separated from interpretations of the text. The author, he says, ‘is born simultaneously with the text, and is no way supplied ...

13/09/2018

One of the key challenges facing our clients and friends across the board is how to attract and engage the world’s best talent. In the world of the university campus, best talent includes students, academics, alumni, industry, and partners, who all contribute to the successes by which universities are now judged.

Interestingly, one of the key attractors for all these audiences is the right access to each other, a wonderful, rich mix of ideators, thinkers, generators, and commissioners who together have the capacity to create new futures and tangible innovation. Crucial, then, to an attractive campus of the future is actively bringing these audiences together to connect and exchange.

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One of the key challenges facing our clients and friends across the board is how to attract and engage the world’s best talent. In the world of the university campus, best talent includes students, academics, alumni, industry, and partners, who all contribute to the successes by which universities...

07/09/2018

As a lesson in experience design for city makers, Gardens by the Bay is one of my favourite examples of the virtues of thinking about the start of a future place not in terms of an architect’s masterplan, but rather as a narrative journey that in itself is composed of and drills down into any number of further journeys.

Referred to by its architect Andrew Grant as a ‘screenplay of experience’, it’s a cinematic approach to place making, imagining Gardens of the Bay not through space, but rather as a set of multi-sensory and multi-dimensional moments unfolding over time. It’s the underlay, a masterplan for the gardens as born of the rituals and myth-making of the human. It’s a screenplay informed by metaphor, by the concept of the visitor as hero, by the marrying of the relative chaos of the sovereign experience with the order of the collective, by the spectacle being brought to life by the spectator. It’s quite a screenplay, and one that begs an accompanying manifesto – meaning I’ve taken the liberty of putting the bones down for one. Let’s dive in.

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As a lesson in experience design for city makers, Gardens by the Bay is one of my favourite examples of the virtues of thinking about the start of a future place not in terms of an architect’s masterplan, but rather as a narrative journey that in itself is composed of and drills down into any numb...

03/09/2018

Calling all architects. I mentioned before that we would look in a little more detail at our work for an Australian university, one in search of creating the ultimate transformative student experience, and for whom we proposed building the whole shebang around what we called the Experience of Freedom. I am a man of my word. Please, read on. There is cake involved.👉⠀

Calling all architects. I mentioned last week that we would look in a little more detail at our work for an Australian university, one in search of creating the ultimate transformative student experience, and for whom we proposed building the whole shebang around what we called the Experience of Fre...

14/08/2018

Partnering with The Urban Developer - Australia’s largest community of property and urban development professionals - this first webcast will look at Mixed-Use Developments and how learning from the world of Brand Strategy and Experience Design can help us all better connect end users with a more valuable end product.

Join The Urban Developer + FreeState Webcast on 23 August!

There is a duality that exists in most development whereby the process is driven by a top-down and product-first approach. Interestingly, all great co

05/06/2018

We are excited to share our new 'What We Do' video! Please watch and let us know what you think! Hope this video gives you an idea of what we are passionate about and what we do.

Please visit our website to read the full story about this!
http://www.freestate.co.uk/the-film-the-art-of-keeping-it-simple-and-alex-maclean/

09/05/2018

When asked recently to help design the ‘ultimate transformative student experience’ for an old sandstone Australian campus university, we decided to build the whole project around the concept of the Experience of Freedom.

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I’ll save you the details for another time, but beginning with a people-centred concept rather than a building required something of a step-change in the way it thought about how to attract, retain and super-successfully graduate students.

15/03/2018

Developers. Your attention, please. When it comes to ensuring that a community is properly served by a large architectural project, we appear to have become super adept at seeming to walk the talk, but in the end – boxes ticked, hoops jumped through – showing our true bottom-line colours: profit, profit and more profit.

I say this not to point fingers, or to tar all developers with the same brush, but rather to underline the fact that I think that genuine community engagement and making a profit are one and the same, a fact underlined by a local artist I was interviewing last December for a piece of research on a m...

11/09/2017

Calling all airports - underlay not overlay! 'Thinking about experience and the airport, it could easily be the most wonderful of programmed festivals'.

1. Borrowing from the success of early Disney, it is the rigour and creative thought that anticipates and sets the agenda for the creation of places made for and by people.

27/06/2017

Adam speaking on the panel for the Raise Your Flag debate. Thanks MA Narrative Environments for putting together this wonderful and insightful event!