“".. design must be seen as a cultural forming and shaping process because design is much more than creating a simple product.” DEVELOPMENT / After familiarizing ourselves with the story behind Helen’s sign and the rich history of the community surrounding this heritage landmark, we knew that emphasizing this community history was going to be our design’s core. As Jodi Forlizzi and Cherie Lebbon affirm, “at the heart of design is the goal of communication, and installing a belief in the audience about the past, present or future.” As Forlizzi and Lebbon recommend, we also strived to create empathy with our target audience. Since our goal was to mitigate the absence of visual and cultural knowledge of neon signs, we decided to find a way to use our designs to form and shape a new neon culture. To paraphrase M.P. Ranjan in his work Hand- Head-Heart: Ethics in Design, design must be seen as a cultural forming and shaping process because design is much more than creating a simple product. To frame our core narrative of the Helen’s/Heights sign, we created a shell that would hypothetically house all of the unique narratives of the neon signs. (imace 2) We wanted the front page to be unbiased towards any particular neon sign; the design, therefore, had to generally represent the time period of the 1950s and 19Gos. Through many sketch iterations, we struck an idea we all agreed upon. Each square shows a different neon sign in black and white, creating a neutral background while showcasing the variety of the signage. For the final design, we chose five bold colours to illustrate the vitality and playfulness of neon. The second component of our project consisted of the narratives of the neon sign and the Heights community. Because the sign was created in the 19Gos, we drew our graphic inspiration from images and illustrations from that era. For the final design, we chose to keep the interface mostly graphic orientated so as to avoid cluttering up the small space of a phone screen. This part of IMAGE 2/ Ashell application (first two from left) houses all of Vancouver’s neon signs and acts as a portal to applications developed specifically for each sign, such us the Heights (right).