Project Type: <span>Exhibition Development</span>

Look Again

An arts and heritage trail championing Milton Keynes’ design history has arrived in the city centre.

Milton Keynes is known as a model ‘new planned city’ around the world. Central Milton Keynes is on the verge of another reinvention which will see a boom in residential development. The city suffers from negative preconceptions about its authenticity and environment which the council, developers and local businesses were looking to change. Look Again tells the story of the new city’s people and places and highlights its standout modern heritage, art, architecture, and design.

The 24-stop free trail runs from Fred Roche Gardens to Lloyds Court and includes artworks in and around Centre:MK.

Scanning a QR code on any of the trail signs takes you to www.lookagainmk.city where you can learn more about that specific piece of art, building or green space, giving a fresh view of the cityscape.

Flow Associates worked alongside Milton Keynes City Council, with funding from developers, to carry out an assessment of the existing offer which consisted of an app and website. We proposed a new web-first approach to create a responsive website which brought the cities art, design and stories to life.

Working closely with the city’s heritage, highways and marketing teams, as well as archives and business partners, Look Again brought together a vision of the city as an evolving showcase for a unique period of British history, modern architecture and urban design. Flow partnered with City Discovery Archive Milton Keynes and Living Archive Milton Keynes, to use archive materials and media from their collections in interpreting the city centre and encouraging locals, workers and visitors to “look again” to rediscover the urbanity around them. “Look Again” is a sideways look at Milton Keynes’ often misunderstood urban landscape to revel in the utopian ideals which built the UK’s youngest city and encourage people to see it as a playground for modernist ideals around civic participation, quality design, and the role of public art in identity and placemaking.

To ensure that Look Again reached the audiences who would be the drivers of Milton Keynes’ future, Flow produced an Audience Development Strategy which built on consultation at public events and audience insights from businesses and cultural partners. From this, we produced a two-year marketing plan across channels to target and reach them through press, events and social media.

 

 

The branding, website and layout of Look Again was by Spy Studios who used the typography and colourways of the city to create a vibrant design identity which resonates with the city’s era of creation.

This first-phase from 2023-24 is a pilot covering Central Milton Keynes. Look Again will look to be developed with partners over the coming years to include more locations alongside the creation of the new MK City Archives which will bring together the collections held across the city.

 

Natural History Museum

A major research and consultation project working with curatorial and Learning teams to develop a new Children’s Gallery, a global international education initiative, onsite programming and online activities. We worked alongside the teams onsite on remotely to establish the guiding principles for the project, develop key interpretive themes and programming which engages young people with caring for and understanding their immediate natural environments and ecosystems as well as those globally.

The research explored how to:

  • Optimise the experience of the new Children’s Gallery, through activities on themes of Wild Voices, connecting with animals’ lives in different habitats.
  • Lift barriers of access to schools, families and groups with intersecting factors of disadvantage or SENDs, by consulting them, travelling to settings with activities, and easing their experience of the NHM as a whole.
  • Inspire and acknowledge young children as imaginative friends of the natural world, and provide templates for partners in the GEI, through online resources for digital and real-world play and nature connection.
  • Develop skills of adults (including NHM staff and volunteers) to reconnect with nature and support children through a ’School of Nature Play’.
  • To do action research as the activities are developed, to serve the global initiatve with insights.