How do you make a unique identity for each location in an ever-expanding network? Meet ARC Finder, our custom tool for Advanced Research Clusters.

Enter an address — any address — into the tool below and it will generate a unique image for that location, whether you’re in Southwark or Siberia.

The ARC Finder is a custom tool that we built for Advanced Research Clusters, a world network of science campuses. Backed by £3bn of investment and with an ambitious plan to be Europe’s largest network of science campuses, ARC is expanding fast. The challenge was how to give each campus its own marque and sense of place, while maintaining a unified identity that conveys the power of network membership.

Our response was a dynamic computational approach. We started with plus codes, a simple concept that has been changing lives across the world by giving hundreds of thousands of people an address for the first time. They are free-to-use digital addresses based on latitude and longitude, assigned to every 14m by 14m square on earth. Displayed as numbers and letters, every code is similar in length to a telephone number — 849VCWC8+R9, for example.

The ARC Finder tool takes each plus code and turns it into a pattern using binary. The result is a dynamic system that responds to any and every location. So each of ARC’s campuses has its own plus code, and so does Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty and your own front garden. Lay each campus marque on top of each other and you’ll complete the circle, creating the ARC marque itself and representing the strength of the network as a whole.

Make your own marque using ARC Finder or read more about Advanced Research Clusters.