One Day In Our Park

The design brief was to clearly articulate the intrinsic relationship between people and place. After weeks of quiet observation in the park emerged a counter-intuitive design strategy – expressing the smallest, incidental and intimate daily experiences of the park community at monumental scale.Built as part of a Metro Tunnel floodwall, the work had to not only offer flood protection but also introduce a more poetic voice to the locale. It had to endure harsh conditions, be made from sustainable materials, and deliver a 50 year lifespan. It needed a give a strong sense of place, conjuring curiosity, engagement and joy.

This project melds design research with design outcome. The sustained observational primary research informed the exploration of materials and an appropriate design language. The typographic execution is complex – involving over 1.6 million tiles across a length of 360 metres. It also required the design of four custom typefaces.The unique design solution was solved by authoring content through observational insight, then articulating that through specialist typographic skills. This unique design strategy approach has never been done at this scale anywhere in the world, and represents an international design benchmark for expressing the essential relationship between people and place.

“I ride my bike past it every day and it always makes me smile” says a local resident. With a lifespan of over 50 years, the enduring social impact of One Day In Our Park will like-wise be long-lasting. It is described as 'poetic and beautiful' by the local community. Educationally, it is a research model in design schools and has won an Victorian Premiers Design Award and AGDA Award. Several local school activities centred around the work, as well as promoting the use of the park. It has become a landmark, as well as a potential cultural destination.

The key feature of One Day In Our Park is its truly innovative design approach to relating people and place – applying research and writing to a permanent and meaningful design form that engages a public whose stories are being told.This project breaks down distinctions between communication design and urban design. Its cross-disciplinary approach challenges the perception of communication design being 'ephemeral' by way of its sheer permanence representing a solid commitment to storytelling, community, meaning and design.Another unique and innovative feature of this project is the elegant complexity of the bespoke letterforms incorporating 1.6 million tiles across 360 metres. The four custom typefaces were meticulously crafted to map upon the system of tile and grout dimensions, each solving a specific communicative problem at different relative scales. Their beauty is achieved by typographic clarity and integrity.Despite the monumental scale of this project, the communication design strategy breaks up the 45 stories so they could be enjoyed as small bite-size joyful 'vignettes', capturing the myriad of tiny and epic things we all experience in a park on a daily basis.