Welcome Mark

Delighted to welcome Mark Irving to FreeState.

A consummate storyteller and something of a polymath, Mark joined the team as Head of Business Development earlier this month, and has been putting his experience and skillset to fine use, stress testing purpose and process, unearthing new narratives in old grounds, and shining an inquisitive light on different sectors and ways of doing. His ambitions across the foreseeable future: ‘To build the business further, widen and deepen our client base, grow our innovatory capabilities, make a case for experience-led thinking and doing in a range of territories’. He adds his experience across spatial, digital, print, broadcast, and immersive technology contexts to the FreeState team.

Mark comes to FreeState off the back of a career variously consulting, directing strategy, developing business, designing, broadcasting, writing and producing for a range of clients, including the BBC, Pixel Artworks, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Museums Greenwich, Household Cavalry Museum, Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery, Eden Qingdao, and the Wellcome Genome Centre. He’s also co-founder and ongoing advisory board director (‘director of story’) of PlusZero, the UK’s first-to-market green hydrogen producer. He previously taught for a decade at undergraduate and graduate level in the Innovation & Enterprise Unit at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. Three illustrative highlights from this backstory:

–    First to Fight: Leading on developing an award-winning multi-disciplinary immersive technology-driven performance project commissioned by Poland’s Ministry of Culture, staged for three nights in the public square outside the WWII Museum in Gdansk, and designed to commemorate Poland’s collective experience during the 20^th century.  ‘This is telling,’ he says, ‘Poland’s story to Poland’s people, both there in the square and on national live television. It was a real honour.’

–   Eden Qingdao: Helping kickstart Eden Project’s first international venture, which has seen ‘a ravaged environment in the former shrimp farming bay’ in the city of Qingdao, in China, transformed by an exemplary piece of experience-led masterplanning, and which in the process required persuading an initially sceptical developer and municipality to commit GBP150 million to the project.

–  Heathrow Expansion Masterplan: Assisting Grimshaw Architects on the ‘the narrative logic and feeling’ of their multi-billion bid for this project, which they won. The expansion sees the creation of a third runway and facilities, including a new terminal building. With capacity for an extra 26,000 flights a year, the airport predicts the intervention will create ‘tens of thousands of jobs and billions in economic benefits to the UK’.

It will not surprise to learn that Mark’s interests are many, old and new. Long-term passions include archaeology, history, art history, international affairs, garden design, scenography, and age-old proven technologies that harmonise with and are guided by nature. These inform and are, in turn, informed by new passions for ‘projection animation, choreography, and blended live performance’, all of which play well into his work. Welcome, Mark.

If you have a project or scheme that might need the kind of experience-led approach FreeState advocates, please get in touch with Mark.