Charlie Tait

Charles Tait is a cultural producer who works with design-led methodologies, often collaborating to engage with other people in the creation of participatory, sequential and experiential outcomes. He is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Teesside University. His work adopts a questioning use of technology along with graphic, service and experience design processes to develop outcomes in the sphere of social good, culture and heritage. Whilst specific project criteria and content mean all projects are unique, he has a love of physical space and materiality as well as ambient and interactive graphics. Underpinning his actions is the desire to operate ethically and sustainably: use of new materials are kept to a minimum with resources and equipment often having been saved from disposal.

He lives in the Tees Valley with his family, where he has just completed building a studio/play space using reclaimed and sustainable materials.

Green Trolley aimed to engage audiences with the subject of food miles and explore societies distant, commercialised relationship with the food we eat. Following a research project and exhibition, he devised an educational series of workshops that fulfilled many aspects of National Curriculum Key Stage 2. The workshops saw children sourcing unused, locally grown fruit before going through a process of making and distributing products.

In 2016 Tait developed The Whisp’rings Project, directing a team from Brazil, Norway and the UK in the exploration of generative artwork. The resulting outcome, named WSPR, exists as code and a curated library of visual elements; generating compositions based on a system of criteria, chance and the millions of live actions on Twitter. WSPR was live streamed globally and installed at Kronborg Castle, Denmark. In 2017, he revisited WSPR for installation in Istanbul where he said “The form finds it's energy from millions of actions, physically disparate but connected by the platform. To what extent is the viewer a voyeur, witnessing something that will occur - regardless of them - compelled to read and interpret without full understanding of the intricate system of which they are part?"