Mengru Li
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LIVE PROJECT – MR CHAMDAL’S APOTHECARY The MA Interior Design programme sits within the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design. This vibrant community is made up of staff, students, designers, researchers and industry partners. Strong creative bridges between postgraduate courses, enables our students to tailor their learning to suit their unique professional ambitions. We encourage and support our postgraduate students to work collaboratively with other creative people both inside and outside the University. By doing this they cement rich cultural, creative and professional collaborations. The Rationale for the Design Systems Module: Engagement with industry and industry-based scenarios is a key aspect of this module. This industry orientated assignment focused the attention of our students on the leisure sector and required them to conduct research about how niche ‘grooming’ services are being situated within
global, regional, national and international contexts. Throughout the module students needed to prove their appreciation of international commercial cultures by justifying the potential connections that this research could have, with new market opportunities and design innovations. Establishing the Brief – students were asked to create an imaginative design scheme for a particular grooming sector. This needed to be a commercial viable offer - a grooming orientated business opportunity, that would launch a new brandscape for: “Mr Chamdal’s Apothecary”. In this project, our students refined the brand identity to reflect the philosophy and culture associated with the local entrepreneur – Bhavnesh Chamdal. They needed to consider the way that the brand values and characteristics associated with the brand, could be represented in an interior design concepts that they developed.