Author: Kismat Shrees

Link to final publication PDF https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UfLg3ORQBNfS9dhqVBLjJN8fMleWyocz/view?usp=share_link

After my first outcome, I gained a solid understanding of King’s Cross club culture and the widespread closures affecting clubs across London and the UK due to restrictive councils, foreign investment, and redevelopment pushing out marginalised communities. Encouraged by my peers, I expanded my research to a macro scale, mapping 18 influential clubs using articles, interviews, and accounts from former clubbers.

I visited these sites on foot, piecing together their locations. Many had been demolished or replaced by upscale offices, flats, or were left vacant. I documented each site with photos and notes on what had taken their place.

To distribute these experiments beyond a screen, I chose flyers, inspired by the way club posters and flyers were historically shared within club culture. I made a physical collection of perforated flyers bound with black electrical tape, printed on thin recycled paper to give a DIY, edgy feel that echoed rave aesthetics.

When presenting to peers, I realised many captions lacked sufficient context for wider understanding. This made me aware that improving the clarity and depth of my written communication was necessary for the next round of iterations.

When presenting my latest posters, I still found that the new symbols I was using too abstract. While the fish was more complex than a square and tied to King’s Cross’s industrial past, its meaning wasn’t obvious without context. I realised some explanation would be needed, but I was trying to communicate too much. Breaking regeneration into four factors felt overly reductive so I needed to focus my enquiry on what mattered most which was lamenting the loss of club culture to corporate interests. To communicate this critical message effectively, I had to find a different approach.

At this stage, I needed to decide how I wanted to realise my project. Inspired by the Mutoid Waste Company’s scrap metal sculptures used in 1980s squat raves at King’s Cross, I connected metal’s industrial heritage with the area’s railway history. I knew I wanted to continue screen printing and so I decided to present the screen prints within metal frames, making materiality central to my work. Because of this my enquiry had evolved: How can materiality be designed to critically communicate the symbolic significance of a subject?

Having built the metal frame, I now needed a screenprint. Inspired by Hamnett and Shaw’s concise, emotional communication, I chose a modified quote from Debby Lee, one of founders of Bagleys. The quote provided social commentary, highlighting clubbing as a natural act of community and dance as an act of resistance against the demonisation of club culture.

Focusing on materiality, I removed distractions like random symbols such as the fish and the crown and instead experimented with meaningful materials. Burlap sacks referenced King’s Cross’s coal industry but I felt it felt nostalgic and before the height of the club culture in the area. Instead, I used old Uniqlo T-shirts, symbolising the transformation of Bagleys’ nightclub site into a commercial space.

The final outcome combines the metal frame, reflecting the King’s Cross industrial roots and squat raves ran by the Mutoid Waste Company with the screen printed quote on a T-shirt that has been commodified (Uniqlo and co.) as well as used in acts of rebellion (Katherine Hamnett). This ties together King’s Cross’s corporate regenerated facade to its underground history as a critique on which cultures are valued within capitalist-driven regeneration projects.

Initially, my project focused on exploring the effects of regeneration on club culture in King’s Cross, a topic I was interested in, but one that leaned more toward commentary than active design practice. It felt more like a social sciences enquiry than a studio-based one.

However, through experimentation and influenced by Stephen Willats, my focus shifted to analysing the systems behind regeneration and communicating them through graphic design. What began with images and text evolved to include colour, shape, and composition. However, feedback from my peers revealed that the basic shapes and colours I used lacked clear symbolic meaning outside my own framework. This made me realise I needed a more effective visual language to communicate the factors behind regeneration. Therefore, my new enquiry is: How can we graphically communicate the systems of regeneration and its impact on local club culture? My new project proposals are as follows:

I needed vector graphics with existing symbolic meaning for the factors I was exploring. Socioeconomic is represented by a fish, in reference to the Fish and Coal building in Coal Drops Yard which stored the commodity. Politics is represented by King George IV’s crown, reflecting local authority. Culture is represented by the iconic rave smiley face, and environment by the King’s Cross gas holders.

I created and refined vector illustrations of these symbols and I found them more meaningful than the previous geometric shapes. However, I questioned whether the symbolism was universal and could be understood by different audiences.

Using my new symbols, I revised the posters by overlaying illustrated line work graphics on the text. I also experimented with a modern take on the bold, condensed typefaces typical of club and protest posters.

I liked these set of iterations than my first ones which were too busy with the photography, and the second set which were too minimal with the shapes. I think this struck a perfect balance. However, I began to question whether it was possible to fully communicate the complexity of regeneration systems, despite breaking them down into simpler parts.

At the beginning of Unit 3, I found that my peers were enjoying the iterations I had presented but there was no context to ground the work in. I was producing the illustrations because I wanted to but I was not asking wider questions in and outside of graphic communication design. I realised that I needed an input for my generative system.

Having grown up designing rave flyers for my friends’ house and techno events, I have always had a huge interest in dance music and rave culture. When I heard about my tutors’ experience with raving in the warehouses across from Central Saint Martins in Coal Drops Yard, I began to research the area’s club history and decided to use club culture as my input. My initial research focused on the Bishopsgate Institute’s archives as it focuses on London’s history.

I discovered two documents, dated 1988 and 1997, that highlighted the council officials’ positive reception toward the regeneration of King’s Cross. Following the post-industrial decline, King’s Cross had deteriorated, and the former warehouses which once stored coal, fish, and other commodities had been left abandoned.

Although the documents only briefly referenced the local club culture, they provided valuable insight into the broader social context in which it emerged. This helped deepen my understanding of the area and its historical development.

Following advice from staff at the Bishopsgate Institute, I explored the Subcultures Archive, which focuses on British youth movements. There, I found primary sources including photos and interviews which provided insight into King’s Cross’s vibrant club culture. I learned that the area’s nightlife began with squat raves in the 1980s before evolving into licensed venues in the 1990s, including Bagleys, The Cross, and The Key.

For a time, King’s Cross was a key hub of London’s club scene which is strange think now because of how corporate and upscale the area is. I learnt that it was because of the regeneration project, one of the largest in Europe, which transformed the area from a grimy place for crime, squatters, sex workers, and raver into home for multinational companies such as Google, Sony, and bougie shops.

With my new input, I needed to produce my first set of iterations. However, I quickly realised that I had to drop the generative design part of my enquiry. I honestly didn’t know how I could randomise parts of the club culture in King’s Cross with coding experiments like I had been doing before. Instead of generative systems, I was now looking at regenerative systems. With this my enquiry had shifted into: Understanding the effects of regeneration on club culture through the lens of King’s Cross.

I became inspired by the works of socially engaged practitioners such as Katherine Hamnett, famed for her protest art, and Corbin Shaw, known for bold imagery referencing club culture. I wanted to draw on their visual language of bold condensed typography and minimalist designs.

These series of posters combines halftone black and white images with text, referencing the screen printing tradition within protest art club posters. I took quotes from articles about clubber’s experience in King’s Cross and paired it with archival images at that time from the Subcultures Archive. This was contrasted by modern statistics on club closures and my own photos I had took on nights out. Together, the posters reflect the systemic decline of club culture in London and the UK.

By drawing on the visual language of protest art and socially engaged work, these works question the value placed on club culture and its preservation amid urban regeneration. While I liked the visual impact of my initial experiments, the combination of bold type and photography felt busy. I began to realise how truly minimalist the work of Hamnett and Shaw were. To make the effects of regeneration on King’s Cross club culture more digestible, I turned to Stephen Willats for inspiration. His conceptual art breaks down systems such as social housing into core elements, allowing him to communicate dense issues through a clear, minimalist visual language.

Inspired by Stephen Willats, I began breaking down the regeneration of King’s Cross into its key driving factors. Drawing from planning documents at the Bishopsgate Institute, I identified interconnected socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors behind the regeneration project such as reducing crime, boosting the economy, and shifting demographics. To better understand and communicate these links, I created a framework in a similar fashion to Willats that mapped these relationships. I assigned each factor a distinct colour and shape to establish a consistent visual language for my ongoing experiments.

The colours and shapes in my framework were partly inspired by visual elements found around King’s Cross. While photographing the area, I noticed remnants of its past including faded numbers and symbols on warehouses, and signage echoing both historic and modern design. Ironically, the branding of the redeveloped area resembled protest art and old club flyers, with bold condensed type and pastel almost neon colours. I adopted this palette in my work to both reference and subvert the corporate aesthetic that has replaced the original club culture.

Using my interlinked framework, I categorised quotes and statistics according to relevant factors. For example, a quotes from a clubber’s experience in King’s Cross fits within both ‘culture’ and ‘environment’. These factors were central to the push for regeneration, as developers and officials aimed to erase the area’s rough edges and displace the clubbing culture.

I experimented with incorporating the shapes I had assigned for each regeneration factor such as square for socioeconomic or circle for politics. While I liked how the vector graphics added visual interest without overwhelming the design, I was not happy with how the shapes overlapped certain text, creating awkward gaps. I also limited myself to keep a consistent central placement but it makes the compositions feel rigid and less effective.

Until this point, my work had been entirely digital, using blending modes to mimic paper textures but this felt inauthentic, more like a pastiche of the protest and club posters that inspired me. Influenced by socially engaged artists like Hamnett and Shaw, who often play with scale, I realised my digital posters lacked a physical presence. This led me to explore screenprinting, drawn by its roots in protest and club culture.

I then replicated the digital experiments in print. I appreciated the vibrant, tactile quality of the colours and the impact they had in person. However, layering was challenging and the lighter pigments appeared almost translucent on darker colours. I also had problems with misalignment and bubbling. Still, I enjoyed the hands-on process and began to enjoy the imperfections which I ironically was trying to emulate in my digital versions.

My enquiry initially look at investigating how biological systems can be applied to generative design. However, the more I thought about this the more I realised that I was overcomplicating it. I was specifically applying the randomness within genetics to generative design but there is a degree of randomness in generative design already. Maybe when I was actually looking at communicating genetics through graphic communication in Unit 2, it made natural sense to talk about genetics and draw parallels between the field and generative design. Since I had left genetics and biology behind, my enquiry needed to change.

My new enquiry is How can generative design systems be applied within the context of graphic communication design?

With my new enquiry in mind, I had two project proposals. First I needed to develop a system for generative design itself. Second, by applying the system through a set of exercises I could produce a publication that compiled the visual output from said exercises.

I decided to step away from working digital and with code as I believed my previous set of iterations were very similar to the work I was producing in Unit 2. I wanted to push myself and see if I could apply a generative system to illustration. To do this, I inputed a formula into excel that would spit out a random number from 1 to 4. Each number was assigned to a colouring pencil that I then had to draw with. To act quick, I would change my colouring pencil based on the random numbers every minute. These exercise lasted 10 minutes each.

These exercise were quite stimulating as it forced me to work quick and adapt as I went along with the different colours. It also made me plan ahead and think of what part of the illustration to start with or work on next based on how the colour would suit the shadows and highlights of the photos I was drawing from.

I found that it was easier to work in quick strokes where I flicked the colour pencil across in lines or in small circles. This meant that the method in which I was drawing was most suited for working with textures such as those of animals or textiles.

I liked how the illustrations came out. They were very playful and colourful however, I found them too cutesy and not necessarily fitting to my visual language. I decided to go back to working without colour and wondered whether the generative design system could provide prompts for designing illustrations instead.

With this in mind, I produced an interface on P5js where I could press random buttons three times and it would provide a prompt. The first button pressed would provide an emotion, the second button would provide a subject like a man or dog, and the third button would provide a verb. This resulted in 64 different possible combinations which are presented below.

With these set of iterations, I didn’t give myself a time limit but as I was working with a pen I couldn’t be too precious with the drawings. I made very quick drawings that were playful and wasn’t trying to be too neat and tidy.

In Unit 2, I was looking at how information can be translated across different domains and what impact this process of translation had on the meaning. This resulted in an investigation into what interfaces are already out there for communicating science such as a textbook or journal article. Consequently, my enquiry had evolved into creating alternative interfaces that can help communicate science to non-specialist audiences. This was the group that I was projecting onto.

I found it hard communicating to non-specialist audiences as there was a fine balance between designing a piece that was visually engaging without abstracting these scientific concepts too much and losing the critical information. For Unit 3, I wanted to evolve my enquiry and instead of communicating scientific knowledge I wanted to see if scientific knowledge could inform the design process.

Throughout Unit 2, my practice had developed through incorporating concepts within genetics and computation into my work. Therefore, I still wanted to work within that intersection of science and design. For Unit 3, my initial enquiry is as follows: How can biological systems be applied to generative design? The audience that I was now projecting my research question onto are other designers.

As I’m not communicating scientific information into the public, I now didn’t feel the burden of educating non-specialist audiences. This meant that there was a large scope for my project and a flexibility in changing the variables within my generative designs.

Carrying on from my work in Unit 2, I was still using the principles from genetics such as randomness. Whereas in Unit 2, I was substituting the variable ‘U’, ‘C’, ‘A’, ‘G’ (the units of information in the genetic code) for colour, I could now substitute them for other design elements such as line, shape or scale.

With my first set of iterations, I decided to substitute the variables for lines in different orientation. Using P5js, I wrote a piece of code that would randomly input strings of U, C, A or G. If the variable presented was U then the line would be horizontal, if it was C then the line would be vertical, if it was A then the line would be diagonal going from top-left to bottom-right, and finally if it was G then the line would be diagonal going from top-right to bottom-left. I could also change the number of grids present resulting in a difference in scale.

For my second set of iterations I wanted to play with greyscale. Depending on which variable (U, C, A, G) was randomly inserted by the code, a square with certain degree of greyness would be presented.

For my third set of iteration, I carried on experimenting with these black and white squares but I wanted to have some level of organisation to them. I wrote some code that would alternate between black and white squares at varying frequency depending on the variable.

I liked my final set of iterations as there was a higher level of design than the first two iterations which felt purely random. The output almost looked like textiles or a tapestry, and reminded me of the work of Annie Albers.