Facing Spaces is a mobile research and design studio, run by Steffen Maas (NL, 1973) and Maarten Verweij (NL, 1976). They offer international workshop programmes for students and design professionals. Exploring the role of graphic design in the public domain is key.

TREAT THE CITY AS A FOUND OBJECT
A context to be understood before being judged.

The city is a useful metaphor for the essence of communication. The complexities of today’s visual culture determine the graphic designer’s methods and products. The designer’s capacity to analyze and register those complexities is vital to effective interventions.

Design and location should be mutually supportive and reinforcing. The interventions and workshops by Facing Spaces reveal local dynamics, identities and possibilities within urban environments or communities.

Communication is the construction of a story that makes us comprehend the complexity of our changing perspectives and environment. Our process-based approach produces rhetorical devices; a visual critique or commentary told from a unique point of view‚ a statement in the open debate on the social improvement of local urban life.

Facing Spaces instigates and operates temporary design workshops for art schools and universities. Its unique research method broadens the professional horizon of graphic design students. The students are instructed to capitalize their visual expertise by visual analysis of an urban location.

WORKSHOP METHOD

1 Registration of urban area

2 Analyzing of architectural and social structures

3 Understanding of complexity of the urban environment

4 Visualisation of the analysis (using the 3 graphic design tools: text, image and color)

5 Design proposal

6 Bring back the design to the area

We reveal the true (hidden) identity of an urban area and its people (by visual research and clear graphic design products):
- Focus on design process
- Unique design and workshop method
- Bottom Up strategy (instead of Top Down by government or market)
- Local storytelling instead of global branding

Collaborations:
CAFA (Central Academy of Fine Art) Beijing [CN] 
Zhejiang Sci-Tech University Hangzhou [CN] 
Fine Arts School of Hangzhou Normal University [CN] 
ShanXi Academy TaiYuen [CN] 
Faculdade de Belas Artes da Univesidade de Lisboa [PT]