Heatherwick Studios and Uncommon Design 'Wake-up Call' Campaign to Launch Humanise Movement

Above: Humanise Brand World

THE HUMANISE MOVEMENT

The Humanise movement was born from a single fact: boring, soulless buildings are more than just boring. They’re dangerous. They’re dangerous to mental health — increasing rates of stress, anxiety and depression amongst those exposed to them. They’re dangerous to our planet too — boring buildings are more likely to be torn down, leading to a carbon footprint five times greater than that of the aviation industry.

But we’re blind to this problem — we’ve grown accustomed to the buildings we walk around every day. The Humanise movement is a wake-up call to soulless, boring cities. Getting people to truly open their eyes to the soulless buildings around them — and get angry at what they see.

The movement was started by multi-award winning British design and architecture studio — Heatherwick Studios — founded by renowned designer Thomas Heatherwick — behind notable projects such as the Olympics 2012 cauldron, Coal Drops Yard in London’s King Cross and the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

Above: Thomas Heatherwick on stage at The Southbank Centre introducing Humanise

Thomas’ ambition is to spark 10 million conversations and trigger a global movement to encourage people to be more aware of the buildings around them. Uncommon Creative Studio were enlisted as a founding partner to help shape the movement through activations as well as develop a new brand world, a website and visual identity which launches today with a powerful call to arms.

The Humanise movement is based on how we all see the world with the aim to remind us to pay attention to our surroundings. Uncommon’s identity is a flexible visual idea — having a logo that anyone can render in their own handwriting represents how this fight is one of a collective. The eye icon encourages people to truly look at the buildings and environments around them.

Above: Humanise Manifesto

THE BORING BUILDING INDEX

The campaign launches with an open invitation to the public to create a global census of the problem we’re facing. ‘The Boring Building Index’, an idea created by Uncommon, is an online census asking citizens from across the world to take pictures of the buildings that depress them.

The ones we have to walk past every day — built by people who didn’t really care enough, or didn’t understand the impact that buildings have on all our lives. The building could be too flat, plain, shiny, anonymous, monotonous or serious. It can be any building, anywhere.

After six months, all these pictures will be analysed by an independent team at a top university. The results will be published online and then there will be open conversations with the developers, designers, politicians and planners who can help to re-humanise our towns and cities.

Contribute a boring building today.

Above: The Boring Building Index

HUMANISE BRAND IDENTITY

The Humanise brand world echoes the aim of the movement: to take a world of soulless cities and hijack it with human creativity. Uncommon designed the brand world taking a base of a beige canvas and monochromatic imagery — and disrupting it with human scrawls, drawings and notes.

Above: Humanise Brand World

Above: Humanise Brand World

Above: Humanise Brand World

Above: Humanise Brand Guidelines

The brand world centres around the Humanise Eye logo — a visual icon which encourages people to truly look at the buildings and environments around them, and see their cities in a new light. The logo constantly shifts between different people’s handwriting — showing the democratic and open nature of the movement. The brand world also uses a typeface that is real handwriting — in fact, one of the fonts is Thomas Thomas’ own scrawl.

Thomas Heatherwick, founder at Heatherwick Studio said, “We’re living through an epidemic of boringness. It’s not just that most new buildings today are characterless, or not nice; there’s compelling scientific evidence they’re impacting our mental, physical and societal health. On top of that, unloved and unlovable buildings also have a surprisingly devastating environmental impact. A story that has barely been told. Humanise calls for a more soulful and humanised world at a time when we’ve never needed it more. Finding the right partner to help us articulate this vision to the world was fundamental in unleashing its power — Uncommon are the most progressive communicators — we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on together.”

Nils Leonard, co-founder at Uncommon added, “It’s easy to feel like we are passengers in our environments. That we have no say in them and that we live despite them. But the built world around us, akin to the content we consume and the brands and products we buy, create the energy we live in. Positive or negative they are the story we live inside. Heatherwick Studios and Uncommon share the same passion to create the world we all wish existed, not be hostage to a world created with a lack of care, to a bromide none of us bought into. We created Uncommon to work on the most important and influential briefs of our time, this partnership brings that conviction closer to reality.”

Above: Humanise Special Edition Book Cover

As well as launching the movement online, Thomas Heatherwick has also released a book on the subject — available to purchase today.

Find out more about the movement here.