“Happy Cities” postulates a more refreshing way to benchmark quality built environments and sustainable urban settings.
Measuring happiness is hugely subjective. There are so many ways of measuring a cities’ happiness: GNP, GDP, Happiness Indexes, etc. What we propose in our design is using the idea of measuring happiness as a starting point. There is a certain obsession with top 20 lists, indexes, and scores, with complicated formulas and theories, after which the cities are ranked. We represent the act of quantifying happiness with the act of measuring; the length of satisfaction, the weight of discontent, the heights of our bliss and the depth of our misery.
Initially, we used measuring instruments (measuring tapes, weighing scales, etc) as the graphic focus. We settled later on using visual representations of measurements instead; Bar Charts, Graphs, Venn Diagrams, as our graphic focus. The basic print colours of CMYK was chosen as the colour palette. When the visuals of the bar charts, and venn diagrams crossed over each other, different colours like green and purple resulted.
A range of print collatorals were designed: A notebook, posters, postcards, and brochures.
The website is designed to move dynamically between sections – horizontally & vertically - in tune with the dynamic lines of the festival identity.
Archifest 2010 takes place at the National Library from 4 Oct to 3 Nov 2010.