Joined-up design in Dundee

Two Dundee University students, Cameron Watt and Cameron Malcolm, talk about their idea to connect the world’s UNESCO Cities of Design

Cameron Watt and Cameron Malcolm, two Dundee University students, have a new project to connect the world’s UNESCO Cities of Design. It’s a mix of old and new, combining past and present to share a message in an innovative way. Think oldfashioned switchboard, married with modern social media.

Dundee is an exciting place to be, says designer and student Cameron Malcolm. He should know, as he and Cameron Watt are part of the university and cultural life of the city.

“The changes that are happening are brilliant, from the V&A to the small creatives that are part of the city,” he says.

The two Camerons set up their collective, WALE, to make the most of the opportunities available for students and designers here – a Dundonian himself, Cameron Malcolm believes the design community has grown in leaps and bounds.

Besides being partners in WALE, both Camerons are product design students. “Our course has helped to develop us as designers who can explore existing and emerging technologies in a playful way.

“It has promoted a culture of ‘thinking through making’ and teaches you techniques to prototype throughout the design process,” Cameron Malcolm says. Design has wider implications. “We take our role as designers seriously,” he adds, “promoting social awareness in our students and an understanding of the impact their designs may have on society.

“The course focuses on designing for the real person: putting people, design and technology at the centre of our design process. We carry out in-depth ethnographic research to craft our experiences for users.”

The course also offers opportunities to work with employers, including high profile companies like Microsoft, giving students valuable relationships to develop in the future.

“I’ve been part of different cultural experiences in the city,” Cameron says. “I’ve attended Pecha Kucha and we were part of the big project at the Dundee Design Festival called Our Silent Monitors, which looked at how people felt about Big Data being used – it was really interactive and interesting and people were really engaged.

“Alongside our university work, we have developed a new project called Voice of a City.”

The project is to link the 22 UNESCO Cities of Design through activities in their creative and cultural communities.

“We want to combine this very new technology – Twitter and social media – through a very old fashioned way of connecting; the old fashioned switchboard.”

That, he says, was a direct, literal person-to-person connection, and their intention was to re-purpose the switchboard technology and connect people via tweets and social media posts, so they could easily find out about a city.

“We want to encourage people to visit each other’s cities,” Cameron explains, “but also to potentially find projects that they can do together, to make connections and to work in a different way.

“We are starting with five or six UNESCO Cities of Design. You plug on to your city and you get a recording of a list of tweets that have been going on that week – what has been happening in the design community, events and projects.

“Also which businesses are taking an active role in the creative industries in that city.”

When it’s finished, they hope to tour the Voice of a City switchboard around the different UNESCO Cities of Design.

“It would be an easy way into a place, using this brilliant badge of UNESCO City of Design.

“Dundee has this incredible network of places to connect with and we want to maximise those connections, while showing off exactly what Dundee has to offer. We have a great creative culture here in Dundee.”