 felly guided kingdom, the United States,'ve long had a special relationship. This is the story of a special relationship between graphic design students across Atlantic. Similarly different is visual collaboration between graphic design students at Portland State University and London College of Communication. It's an annual project and we've been running it since 2013 and it experiments with the notion of cultural points of view of view through the mediums of letterpress screen printing, isograph and digital reproduction. And at the end of the process the students exhibit in both London and Portland. So why is a project like this worth exploring? And I think we all know that the internet has had this homogenizing effect of design and you see a lot of similarities. But there are still a lot of regional differences that persist and perhaps the quickest window yr unigodion that is through educational experiences, and I've been lucky to experience both education in the U.S. and the U.K., and got a sort of front seat to that myself. Generally speaking, design education in the U.S. Focuses on a more commercial-ly driven subject matter and skills-based whereas the UK focus is more on, I would say, concept rather regardless of medium and with less of a concern of commercial output, at least in the educational sphere. I haven't found either one to be better than the other, but I think each one sort of serves the students of their region for where they will be graduating. I'm really happy that I got to experience both. There's our little Venn diagram to show you, not to scale. Of course, the students benefit from travel itself. Outside of workshop time with our program, they get to experience language, architecture, fashion, and of course typography throughout the city, which definitely does have these slight differences. They're exposed to new cultures that bring with them new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing. But back to where it all started, Oswin and I met at grad school in London at Central St. Martins, and I realized during my time there that there was definitely some similar differences to the way that the two design cultures, UK and US, are. And when I became a tenure track professor here in Portland, I wanted to find a way to give some of that experience to my own students. And so I reached out to Oswin to try to make that a reality. So Oswin was teaching at UCA Farnham, which is a school just outside of London. And we decided we would attempt a remote collaboration. And so this is one of the, you can see some of the results here from that remote collaboration. We gave each student a partner across the Atlantic, and we asked them to supply each other with information, stories, histories, and visual reference material about their own hometowns. And their hometowns may or may not have been Portland or Farnham, they may have come from different areas. And then each student would take that source material and create a piece of work about their partner's home. And so the works were then presented at both schools, and you can see the books there. We also had the work shown at larger scale. And Oswin and I were able to travel to each other's locations with some financial support from our institutions. So the previous slide was in the UK, and then here is at Portland State University. The following year, Oswin's colleague Craig Burston became the head of graphic and media design, the graphic and media design course at London College of Communication. So we quickly jumped on that bandwagon to get to London. And I tried to figure out, okay, now I really want to bring students to London. And luckily Portland State University has a great international office that helps professors create faculty-led trips. So I was really supported in the process of doing that. You should definitely, those of you teaching at universities, if you're curious about it, reach out to your international office. Faculty-led trips are often supported in universities. Oswin and I got busy working on new briefs for the students to collaborate on. Their first one was to design a letter form that would become a piece of the logo type. In this case they were creating, I think the original one was to create a letter form that sort of related to their neighborhood. So this was in I think in 2014. Over the years we have given them varying levels of restrictions for the logo type. So as you can see here we gave them a lot more restrictions on this one. And then of course this one we had a lot less restrictions given. And this is our most recent. We actually just returned from London I think two days ago, three days ago. So here's an example like Tinerary. The trip is now a three week period. The students wanted me to extend it from two and a half weeks because they wanted more time to explore and to make it. Workshops have included letter press, screen printing, typography, risograph and pinhole photography in addition to other things which I'll share. So the students start out with a short presentation which sounds a little bit scary. Students are at all levels so they could be a sophomore junior or senior generally speaking or second year or third year. And the idea here is just to get it all out there really quickly. And this is something we had to do in grad school and I thought it worked really well because basically you share something you're interested in, some of your own work. And I also asked them to share some of their preconceived notions about the other person's culture and usually some laughs ensue and it just sort of breaks the ice a little bit. Then we go to the pub afterwards because that's what you do. And then they have something already to talk about it. It's like oh you're the person who did that infographic on internet dating and oh you're the guy that really loves Gilbert and George and then they're already rolling. So we're really lucky to have the chance to get to work with the excellent technicians that work at London College of Communication. This is Barbara Salvedori who is demonstrating screen printing techniques. This year's screen printing required the students or we asked the students to create a flag for a nation or a community that was real or imagined and they worked in groups. And so we had students come up with a flag for colonizers of Mars. We had a flag for an international creative community. We had a flag that was about signifying welcoming of immigrants and then this one which had so many variations that the students decided to show quite a lot of those variations. This was for the generation Z. They were exploring that young generation Z. And one thing that I personally love about working with the letterpress technicians at London College of Communication is that it gives our students a chance, when I say our students I say our USA students, a chance to see how letterpress is being pushed into the future or not being held quite so in such a precious way as I feel like sometimes it is here in the U.S. The students ran across the street, got this newspaper, then ran it through the press with all these different colors. They just kept adding ink and then as you can see tried a bunch of different colors, ran it through at different angles. They allow a lot of experimentation in the letterpress workshop. The technicians who work there are always up for the kind of challenges that Oswin and I come up with. This particular year shown here we wanted the students to work modularly. The challenge was to create a piece of work that somehow communicated the relationship between the two cities of Portland and London. So this shows the students planning their design on grid paper and then working with a metal type and they're working with the underside of the printing material. And then there's one color of the design all locked up and the design is the two rivers of the two cities, the Thames and the Willamette. Here they are printing. And this happens in two days. I mean the students, again it's like they get an induction in I want to say a half an hour and then it's like you've got type in your hand which I love. And then here's the final piece. There's just a little bit of actual type on there to indicate the rivers. And this is just another example showing another piece from that same brief of all this type locked together completely created with the undersides of type material. One of my favorite briefs that we've done was this one in which I asked the students, I'd call it the Roundel remix. And this is a critique where the students are working on the project and I asked them to take the iconic underground mark and create their own interpretation of it which is, you know, the London, Transport for London does it all the time and it's such an iconic mark that it can stand up to just about any remix and it's a great little piece to work with. And I think some of the some of the works that the students made are just as good as stuff I've seen around in the underground. The piece on the left was made from archival images from London Transport's website I think or somehow she found this archival material. So it's literally from their archival material. And this brief was a neighbourhoods one which we've actually run a couple of times with slightly different emphasis. And from the most recent trip we asked them to produce a type driven piece based on the neighbourhood. We gave them a list and they had to choose from them. So this is Overheard Conversations in Bloomsbury. And then this one, again the same brief, a student was exploring Whitechapel and the various immigrant communities. Many of whom no longer exist but have passed through and settled in Whitechapel. And towards the end of the three weeks, two and a half weeks, three weeks, the students put together a catalogue in order to document the whole process that also goes as part of the exhibition. The format and processes vary. This is from a couple of years ago a group of students. We had a budget to print offset lifo and so we managed to take all the students to a large printer on the outskirts of London so they could do a press pass and also as part of it see it on press being printed, ready for folding. But the printing varies so this was using riceograph and the students printed it and folded it themselves as well as designing it. And this was the offset one, the final one folded. And then this is the most recent one and that was just digitally printed. And it all culminates in an exhibition so that the students don't just produce this work and keep hold of it. It's actually shown so that other people at the university and my various contacts in London briars various contacts and also people that have undertaken this collaboration in previous years can come look at it and kind of celebrate the work that's been done. And sometimes we've done this in the university exhibition spaces themselves and sometimes we do them in various galleries across London. And outside of the actual making, the doing of the projects, the students do have time to unwind and go and explore London. Sometimes part of it is in a pub but also they go and kind of make the most of everything London's got to offer, all the fantastic museums and galleries. This one's in the London Transport Museum, I know it's one of briars favourites and they also eat. So Briar likes to start them off in an English pub with English food, which is a lot better than it used to be so that's fine. And we also have a kind of, not a last supper, a last meal I guess. This time it was in an Indian restaurant but we often, I think the most recent one was in a Turkish restaurant so we kind of like to make the most of all the different cultures within London. Not just it being kind of stereotypically English. I don't think anyone had had Turkish in our group. No, there were a lot of surprised faces. But that's good, that's good. And also this time around Briar took some of the Portland students to an external workshop for type tasting with Sarah Hindman. Where she took the students through the kind of history of type and a chance to try lettering styles as they go. As we're on this image a few of the students from this year and previous years are volunteering today so try and chat to them if you can. We also take them on studio visits. This is at Spin with Tony Brook. And I magazine with editor John Waters. And this is at MB Studio with, sorry, Nick Finney. And so reflecting on these there are obviously outcomes that some of them we want the students to have kind of developed but some are kind of almost accidental really. And some of it is apparent to them and to us at the time some of it doesn't happen until further down the line. But it gives them a greater understanding of typography and design and the context and differences. It helps them develop wider friendship circles and networks. Gives them career ambition. Gives them greater independence as well. And it helps develop their sense of cultural awareness. And also teamwork a lot of them struggle with working in groups and this kind of is a good way of just throwing them in at the deep end getting them to not be precious and work quite quickly in groups. And so the legacy of this project is still going so it's not dead yet. But the students have kept in touch with one another. They've also travelled independently since doing the project to see each other and some have looked at working in other countries. But it has also had an impact beyond the participating students. We've now, well we're in year two of a student exchange where two students from each university go and study for a term at the other one. And this is Jodie from the first year. She didn't do similarly different but the exchange has directly come out of that and is now embedded in both courses. And Chris Roberts a colleague who initially ran the foundation course at Farnham. For the last four years he's been running a collaboration with Paris College of Art and Central St Martin's. And he took similarly different as a kind of starting point as an inspiration for that. So the challenges. Funding is always a challenge. But the most difficulty comes in working within two different educational structures. So the PSU students get credits for taking part in this unit whereas at London College of Communication they don't. It's just an optional extra. And because it's not fully embedded yet at London College of Communication there are issues with funding not happening until the very last minute which can make planning a problem. And in the future we plan to well it's happening at the moment as part of a revalidation of the London College of Communications Graphics course. The project is being written in so it will now be more sustainable going forward I think. There should be more opportunity for growing it. We're also looking at extending it into other countries which we split. We want to do it but it's going to be a lot of extra work. And we're looking at Denmark and Germany at the moment. And there's also talk of extending the link beyond the graphics courses within the university so kind of cementing the links between the universities more fully. And all this just to keep it on the road really. And that's it. Thank you very much.