To ‘design the world you want’, you’re going to need more ideas.
Emerging and established designers across fifteen disciplines including architecture, fashion, product and digital design will be fronting Melbourne Design Week with a range of exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, talks and tours. (Featured image:@timmccartney)
The 2021 festival program is chock-a-block with all designers asked to explore the theme ‘design the world you want’ supported by the three pillars—care, community and climate—in order to create and build a better and healthier world for us all.
This year’s edition also sees the return of the Melbourne Art Book Fair and the Melbourne Design Week Film Festival as well as the extensive Waterfront program which explores the possible futures of the Gippsland Lakes region.
The ideas-driven festival has grown enormously from its inception in 2017 to become Australia’s largest international design festival. Last year saw more than 300 events across the festival and this year promises to be no different with many, and we mean many, events free to attend. Find below the ones that have caught our eye and our interest but make sure to check out the Melbourne Design Week website for everything else that’s on offer.
Kicking off on 26 March, the Melbourne Design Week will run for eleven days until 5 April.
1. 64 Ways Of Being
64 Ways Of Being is a soon-to-be-released app that will bring to life Melbourne’s streets, alleys, parks and waterways via augmented reality in order to create conversations about the past, present and future of the city.
For this event, you can join the short talk by the creators of the app and then tag along the twilight walk to play and interact with Melbourne via the pre-release build of the app.
2. Draw And Explore
Do you run? Do you ride? Do you have fitness goals?
Well, Draw and Explore is all about you swapping your fitness goals for creative goals and helping you to use various apps to plan and record your journey so as to create a drawing.
You might already know how to do this, which is great and means you can share your drawing via email with Orcha Collective and they will upload it to the Collaborative Map Drawing Collage.
If, on the other hand, you need some help or pointers to start, sign up to one of the free online workshop sessions where key tips, tricks and hints will set you on your way to creating interesting illustrations.
3. COMMUNITY: An Exhibition Occupying Empty Shopfronts
Empty shop fronts are nothing new but since the pandemic began, more and more have been appearing on our high streets.
COMMUNITY is an exhibition which will set up shop in 24 vacant shopfronts in Collingwood and Fitzroy, all along the length of Smith, Gertrude & Brunswick Streets. The designs of each vacant shopfront have been curated by a number of designers from Australia and abroad and range from functional responses to conceptual explorations that aim to give these spaces some sort of purpose or speculate how they can be used going forward.
COMMUNITY can be experienced on foot (free) or as part of a curated walking tour ($14).
4. A New Normal
Led by Finding Infinity, A New Normal is a series of free events that ask Melburnians to think of their city as completely self-sufficient and what it would take to become so.
Through a series of installations and talks given by some of Melbourne’s leading architecture and design firms, A New Normal will explore ideas such as turning multi-storey carparks into battery banks, the quest to creating unlimited water, and how we can use the heat generated by the city among others.
For additional events, please check A New Normal’s website: www.normalise.it.
5. Re-Imagining Fashion Workshop: Towards Sustainable Fashion Futures
We all know that the fashion industry is one of the worst polluters on the planet and that the production of garments often takes advantage of people that find it difficult to defend themselves from abuse. Nonetheless, fashion isn’t disappearing and this workshop seeks to answer how the industry can move forward using human-centered design with smart technology to tackle fashion’s social, ecological, economic, and cultural challenges.
For anyone interested in fashion and its future, this is for you.
6. Sanitary Secrets
Sanitary Secrets is an exhibition that questions how graphic design can perpetuate or diminish the stigma surrounding periods through the display of 100 sanitary pad ads from the past 100 years. The exhibition will explore how visual communicators have a responsibility to ethical design and how they can address harmful norms in their work while encouraging the audience to question their own attitudes towards periods and where these might stem from.
7. A World We Don’t Want
The theme for this year’s Melbourne Design Week is ‘design the world you want’. However, what if the only way to find out what kind of world you want to live in is by deciding what are the type of things you don’t want to be a part of this future.
This is where A World We Don’t Want comes into play. Exploring fourteen ideas by leading Australian creatives, this discussion will centre on the opposite of what we do want.
Opening night of A World We Don’t Want will be held in conjunction with A Suggestion of a Possibility by Natalie Turnbull and Drift by Tom Fereday. It is also a BYO cup event, so if you want to drink, bring a drinking vessel.
8. ArchiPitch For Social Housing Of The Future
In just three minutes, can these firms convince the judges and audience that their idea is best?