Live Project – Jelley’s Vodka - artisan distillers of a Premium British Vodka. The Interior Architecture and Design masters degree sits within 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 design networks. 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 retail sector and ‘experience economy’. This short five week assignment required them to conduct research about how niche ‘pop-up’ retail interventions 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 experiential design innovations. 188
Establishing the Brief: Students were asked to create an imaginative design scheme for a particular hospitality market sector. This needed to be a commercial viable offer - a branded retail orientated business opportunity, that would launch a new brandscape for: “Jelley’s Vodka”. In this project, our students refined the brand identity to reflect the philosophy and culture associated with the local entrepreneur – Ben Jelley. Ben is an Interior Design Alumni and appreciates the creative and technical nature of the design task. He briefed the students about how they might consider his business values and the special characteristics associated with Jelley’s Vodka brand, and how these could be represented in the interior design concepts that they developed. Rewarding Excellence: At the end of the assignment, Ben participated as an expert judge at our studio crit. This was a very special day and each creative team professionally pitched their conceptual design to Ben.By presenting their creative adventures as a movie, each team were able to tell their design story and professionally present the rationale for their interior proposal. Ben supported the students by creating his own pop-up Vodka bar at the 2017-2018 Birmingham School of Architecture and Design Graduation Show.