What Cottbus Could Learn From Offenbach

Cottbus, Germany, impressively demonstrated lately how an attempt to recreate the image of an entire city and the way it is communicated can miss. The public's distinct reactions in the end forced the city's government to withdraw the new logo which was chosen in an ominous competition.

Recently I read about another German city that plans to reconsider and redefine its image: Offenbach (Main). And what I read, made me assess their approach much more optimisticly. As the city's mayor Horst Schneider announced, it's not a marketing agency this important task will be consigned to. Offenbach is actually aware of the potential of its home-grown creatives and the power of a focal point like the Hochschule für Gestaltung where all needed capabilities are concentrated. So the city's government is currently preparing to set up a foundation professorship at the HfG. The new professor and his students will work on bases and concepts to establish an image of Offenbach as a city of creativity. In the end the developed ideas will be implemented and realized by the students themselves.

The city will allocate € 100.000 for the project and several institutions are to supplement the budget. The idea to set up the foundation professorship goes back to the so-called «Kreativ-Beirat», a creativity advisory board, established by the mayor himself.

I'm really excited what the result of this exemplary approach will be. As I am a student of visual communication myself I'm absolutely convinced that projects within which you have to deal with the basic conditions and requirements of a real job imparts an important amount of experiences. And of course it is a great idea to use the fresh and unconsumed creativity of inspired design students driven by their enthusiasm to see their ideas working in public.

It is so important that art and design academies interact with the city and the public spaces around them. Especially design and visual communication has to happen in its contemporary context. The exchange with people of other contexts and the confrontation with a diversity of challenges beyond a poster design feeds the mind and avoids the students getting stuck at their laptop screens. It would have been great to do a project like this within the context of my studies. Today an academy must not be limited to the building it's located in. A contemporary academy has to detach itself from any location and has to become a space spreading through the streets of the urban enviroment around it, has to consume it to transform it. It has to become a network hub (there's also a great article on that topic in the eye blog), a shared attitude and a culture of dialog between its inside and the outside world. (via Offenbach-Post online)