Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Woking on Aalto University brand renewal, every day we are facing a challenge: how to give individual stakeholders the sense of identity without losing brand consistency? How to create strong brand frame but leave the space for creativity? How to design a brand that would be used by people with no design education? How to accommodate needs of community of 16000? Aalto University is relatively young university (established in 2010 as a merger of three major Finnish universities), and it’s brand is constantly re-defining. To date, Aalto University has over 12000 full-time equivalent degree students, and staff of about 4000, which makes Aalto community (excluding alumni and bigger family) around 16000 people. Due to nature of the university and academic freedom conviction, the established order of hierarchy is close to liberal democracy. As opposed to private sector, brand team does not have a mandate to police brand usage. But we have the power to create tools that would help people visualise their initiatives. From a graphic design standpoint, we work on the strong aesthetics that serves the needs of the community, but first and foremost we are working on community building. We do not have ready answers for challenges we are facing, but we have a number of failure and success stories and methods of embracing community needs and building tools for flexible design systems. Through the discussion we would like to learn more about challenges our colleagues are facing and what methods they are using to solve these issues.