IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A
Abstract
In parallel with the recent interest in the relationship between design and heritage, graphic heritage has emerged as a new theoretical and practical domain that integrates several academic fields and professional contexts. Its evolution has followed a global south-to-north path between South America and Europe and a west-to-east direction between North America and Asia. The design context underpinning this ascendency is rooted in the critical, creative, and poetic ways graphic design contributes to the functioning of cities through, for example, advertising spaces, commercial and industrial signs, facades, and lettering in a fusion of graphic memory, visual heritage, cultural heritage and urban culture. Graphic design in this sense is a framing device for a graphic image of the city and its urban heritage. One of the earliest uses of graphic heritage delineates the art of engraving, but it is also related to literary mapping, imitation, architectural drawings, football crests, and urban heritage. This paper presents a classifying framework for graphic heritage for the benefit of the diverse uses of the concept until now and for future research. Through the utilisation of recent research in South Africa and Australia, the means, meanings and measures of graphic heritage are introduced and illustrated through recent research and impact activities in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa. Colonialism, toponymy, and topophilia provide the basis for practical applications of the concept that reveal how the methods utilised by graphic heritage migrate between continents through the related domains of heritage interpretation, presentation and representation.
Robert Harland is a Reader in Urban Graphic Heritage at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. His research is guided by the question: How do graphic objects facilitate the function of cities and urban places? His expertise covers the macro, meso, and micro dimensions at which people interact with urban places and spaces through graphic images in the context of urban heritage. He has led several funded international research projects with NGOs such as the Shanghai UNESCO City of Design, the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Alison Barnes’s expertise is in the nuanced understanding of ways communities and places reflect their differing histories and heritages and in doing so, create everyday heritage spaces. Her research explores graphic heritage concerning ideas of food and migration; critical toponymy and placemaking; sports stadia and supporter rituals and identity; architecture and heritage listing; and, gentrification and design literacy, in diverse urban contexts. Her design research interests span the differing roles graphic design can play in the mediation, construction, and communication of everyday life, belonging and identity. Alison is a Senior Lecturer in Design at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Yolandi Burger’s expertise is in co-design methodologies between local communities, creative industry practitioners, and NGOs. Her design research interests combine graphic heritage for social impact in real-world scenarios. She has pioneered the development of graphic heritage in South Africa through her work with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, bringing together heritage practitioners, archive specialists, intellectual property and copyright professionals, creative industries practitioners, and urban planners, showcasing new approaches to conveying Mandela’s graphic heritage connected to places named after him. Yolandi holds a PhD in Higher Education Studies from the University of the Free State in South Africa.
9:45 am - 11:15 am
Wednesday 25th June, 2025