Dr Robert Harland is a Reader in Urban Graphic Heritage at Loughborough University in the UK. His research explores how urban environments function through their graphic objects, explored through the lens of graphic design as urban design. Most recently this perspective has been applied to how cities and urban places communicate through heritage interpretation. Since 2018 he has led the Urbanism theme for Loughborough’s Built Environment Beacon and before then was one of the founding members of the interdisciplinary Leicester Urban Observatory.