The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment – Website for innovative initiative engaging local communities in design

2020 – ongoing

WebsitesBrand

The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London is an academic centre for the study of the built environment and home to twelve departments that have expertise in various related fields.

The Melbourne Centre for Cities at the University of Melbourne is designed to foster responsible and cosmopolitan city leadership, and the information it needs, in an interconnected and increasingly urbanised planet.

Bottom-up Infrastructure (BUI) is a collaboration between Bartlett and Melbourne Centre for Cities that explores how communities can engage with infrastructure design to create sustainable and healthy places. We worked with BUI on a new visual identity and website to showcase their work.

Centred around projects

BUI needed a website to showcase eight different projects that had involved communities in the subject of infrastructure. They wanted it to be based around the ‘infrastructure lifecycle’ and for it to engage their target audience of interested communities, infrastructure engineers, designers, co-design practitioners and community engagement specialists.

We worked with them them to develop a site structure that enables users to browse and select a project of interest easily. Projects cover a range of topics from supporting communities to restore lost rivers to working with local groups to act upon concerns about air quality from construction works. Each project has a dedicated landing page with a narrative overview and some structured information around timescale, geographical scale and budget.

Distinctive visual identity

We developed a bold new visual identity that intentionally set it apart from the standard UCL and University of Melbourne brands. As BUI was a stand-alone fellowship project, we were free to take an entirely bespoke approach to the palette, interface and the layout of the website.

The stripped back colour palette is black, white and bright yellow. Large impactful photography is used sparingly throughout alongside an extensive library of custom iconography that is used distinguish different types of tools.

Methods, tools and publications.

The projects pages are supplemented by a cross-cutting set of ‘methods’ which are detailed statements of the co-design process used to implement the bottom-up infrastructure approach. Example methods include ‘setting aims’, ‘characterising communities’ and ‘crafting solutions’. Website users can explore the methods used on a given project or the projects on which a particular method was used.

Similarly, the website features a set of ‘tools’ such as school teaching materials, volunteering briefing documents, and field notes templates. Each tool has a page which contains a brief synopsis and links to download relevant files. Website visitors can see which projects or methods a tool has been used on and vice versa.

The website also features a publications library that details all of the published outputs from this body of work, with clear links out to relevant journals and other academic destinations.

Extending the life of the website

In 2026, with the project completed and the funding pot for the website having been used up, we were able to keep this important resource online by making a static copy of the website. This is possible when the content of a website isn’t going to change in the future, and involves running a script that saves each page as a separate HTML file with its styles, images and PDFs alongside, although it does entail the removal of dynamic functionality like the site search engine. These file can be hosted at a significantly reduced cost compared to a WordPress installation, with its attendant requirements like a database server. In turn this meant that the hosting could continue to be funded from a general budget, keeping the site available for an indefinite period.