Cities tell stories. Each city has its own story based on its history and its hopes for the future. The story of the city is expressed through its particular mix of layout, flows, buildings, sounds, images and the life styles of its inhabitants. Cities are complex organisms each with a different voice and a different narrative. People travel the world to immerse themselves in the spirit of places and grasp at least some small elements of that narrative. For example, when people flock to the Shanghai Expo or the London Olympics, they will not just be looking at the exhibitions or the games, they will want to explore the city and take away personal memories. Likewise the people of London and the people of Shanghai want visitors to sample the magic of their cities and return again.

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, one of the best known art and design institutions in the world, has developed a new post graduate course, MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments which promotes the research and design of places through stories. The students use story telling techniques to design urban environments, heritage sites, exhibitions, events, retail and leisure experiences. The work produced by students has won prestigious awards such as the UK’s D&AD award, the UK’s Royal Philharmonia Award 2007, and is included in the global INDEX Award exhibition, currently touring the world till 2009. The course advocates multidisciplinary collaboration between architects, spatial designers, graphic and moving image designers, writers and psychologists. Teams work together to make complex multi-sensory environments that provide both information and immersive experiences for visitors.

The collaboration with the CAA is an exceptional opportunity to develop new ways of offering visitor experiences through an ambitious international collaboration. The project arises through the joint vision of the Course Director of  MACPfNE, Tricia Austin and one of our recent alumni, Zhijie Yao who is now teaching at CAA. Together we recognized the potential to build a bridge between the UK and China, between London and Hangzhou, between CSM and CAA, between the staff and students in both universities by developing a creative brief for a novel way to introduce visitors to our respective cities. We are looking beyond the standard city guide to provide a one-to-one service that allows visitors to experience the “real, authentic” gems of our two cities. This is a project we see as the beginning of a long-term creative relationship between CSM and CAA that will have tangible outcomes for all concerned.

The two universities are collaborating using new video conferencing facilities. Students are working in mixed teams exploring each others’ cultures and cities. The multidisciplinary teams will work together to create multi-sensory environments combing architecture, moving image, sound and text. Importantly our methods involve starting with the stories of city inhabitants, in other words how people make friends, establish as sense of belonging, play and interact. These stories will then be mapped onto the physical structure of the cities in order to provide a new kind of cartography that correlates the intangible, cultural dimension of experience with particular places. Our methods are draw from the rich history of narrative pratcice. We collect stories, we create stories, we give those stories form, we map stories onto spaces and we create platforms for people to tell their own stories.