Melbourne Design Week
This year a design event in Melbourne is being reinvented and brought to life, with the aim of fostering and celebrating the culture of design in the city. This event is Melbourne Design Week.
Part of the Victorian Government’s newly established Melbourne Design Program, a year-round calendar of curated events fostering design within Victoria in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne Design Week aims to deliver a dedicated program celebrating, promoting and strengthening design in Melbourne.
With a range of local and international guests, keynote speakers, panel discussions, exhibitions, business and community programs, Melbourne Design Week seeks to commence meaningful conversations around design, generating new thoughts and ideas to benefit both designers and communities from Indigenous architecture, to product innovation.
The program also seeks to facilitate communication between businesses and the community in one event Open State, where 15 businesses will open their doors to the public, discussing how they have used design to transform how they work and how they add value to the business.
We spoke with Ewan McEoin, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design and Architecture at the National Gallery of Victoria and part of the curatorial team for Melbourne’s first Melbourne Design Week, about the effect of design in Melbourne, the Melbourne Design Week program’s diversity and the mission of the event.
fluoro. What impact do you think design has on Melbourne?
Ewan McEoin. Design has a significant impact on Melbourne across many different terrains, whether it is shaping the built environment around us and where we work, the public space, the civic amenity of the city, but also how it affects our culture and the kind of relationships we have with each other. It affects the way we move through the city, it affects the way we communicate.
In any contemporary global city, design and architecture has a profound impact. Whether that’s observed or is more something that is oblique and more explicitly in Melbourne, we have key things that we are known for: architecture, we export architecture around the world, contemporary jewellery practice, fashion design, games design (we are one of the leading cities in the world). So, there are things that Melburnians do very, very well and Melbourne Design Week aims to annunciate those things while also articulating to the general public how much design actually affects their life.
f. How does the Melbourne Design Week program consider an untraditional way of interacting or viewing design in an objectified way?
EM. We do have objects within the program, but what we’re looking at is what can you read about the values through an object. There’s a thematic approach that we’ve put forward for 2017 which is Design Values – how do we value design and what are the values of design.
There’s two ways you can do that. You can display objects and contextualise them and help people understand that beyond and behind every object there is a thought process, an industrial process, there’s a material process, which gets people thinking about many different things which are embedded and often invisibly within a product. Then beyond the physical object, there are issues such as gender identity, mental health, issues such as the way we communicate and interact with each other, recognition of Indigenous people – other conversations which are going on in the design realm – which mostly connect with just contemporary conversations that go on in society. Designers have a role to play in those spaces and we have a big program of talks and other things where people can understand more about that.
f. Why was Design Values selected as the theme of the inaugural Melbourne Design Week?
EM. I think really what is important is the theme helps to construct a thread around which audiences can build their own understanding of any medium or topic. And design values provide something that designers can – it’s a multilayer proposition: what are the values of designers right now and those things are often quite different from what the values might be perceived by the general public.
The general public might perceive values such as aesthetics or style, lifestyle or maybe they’re talking about different things that are trending within the movement, whereas designers are generally much more in line with what are the needs of their clients in a business sense, what are the emerging issues around production such as manufacturing offshore, materials selection, sustainability. We’re trying to provide access points.
f. One of the program highlights is 26 Original Fakes. Why was this selected as part of the program and why is it important to highlight replicas across design?
EM. 26 Original Fakes is a group show where a bunch of Australian designers are customising a copy of the HAL Chair by Jasper Morrison.
Australia is the only developed country, I’d say, which has become a dumping ground for copies around the world.
We have furniture companies that sell replica design and have blurred the boundaries of what replica actually means. Replica means fake and copied – copied off living designers that significantly impacts the income of the designers and this is something that we’ve very passionate about as a curatorial team and as a gallery.
Copying design is a problem that needs to be addressed more seriously in Australia, and we’re happy that someone has put forward a project that allows to tease out that conversation a bit more.
f. What other conversations do you foresee coming to life at Melbourne Design Week? How can Melbourne take a central role in igniting conversation around design and design values?
EM. There’s a discourse about how we maintain the natural balance within our cities in terms of urban ecology. There is definitely a conversation about the role of Indigenous thinking and consultation processes in the way we shape cities around us and the way that collaborations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people work and can be made to work better.
There’s also major conversation about how design has a role to play in gender identity, and in terms of gender equality there are ongoing conversations such as gender imbalance in design.
f. Do you think Melbourne is an influencer in design, globally? How do you foresee Melbourne Design Week aiding in Melbourne’s development across design?
EM. To be honest I don’t think Melbourne is an influencer in design around the world. I think that we have some practices from Melbourne who are exceptionally successful on an international platform and I think that there is an awareness of Melbourne as a livable city, and a city of great culture and food.
I think it would be a stretch to say that people instantly associate Melbourne with design but that is not unusual because to be honest, I don’t think that there are many cities that, from a design industry point of view where people say ‘oh that’s a design city’.
Really design weeks globally are, in my view, are assessed on the quality of the ideas that come through them. It’s not just about scale, and it’s not just about how many people launch new products, it’s from a critical point of view – whether there is a new and relevant conversation going on. For us, that’s why we have a theme and it’s a curated program and it’s about clarity of message and quality control to allow the thing to scale so that it has a reputation as being a design week that fosters good ideas and yes it’s about business and innovation, but it’s not just about some idea of selling something.
What a design week, such as Melbourne Design Week is there to do, is create a platform for the design community in that place to aggregate and tell a story at a certain point in time that’s for a local and international audience. Melbourne Design Week is not new, there have been previous iterations with different names like Melbourne International Design Festival, so what we’re excited about is the involvement now of the NGV as Australia’s most visited public gallery, a major cultural institution. This gives some sense of having more weight and gives you more bass in the audience, more reach and we hope that just allows the whole program to scale more.
f. The pieces selected as part of the exhibition Creating the Contemporary Chair weren’t the highest selling, or the pieces that were produced in mass, it was about having weight and having a story to tell…
EM. That’s what we look at anything we collect for the gallery is…collecting is a responsibility of you preserving it for the public into the future. So we’re quite thoughtful about buying something that should be part of the gallery as a collection, it’s not just because it’s been published lots or it’s been sold in lots of units. It’s got to be a market along a trajectory of progression in the design practice.
f. And why is that important to the National Gallery of Victoria?
EM. That’s what we do with art. That’s what we do with public collections. You consider carefully what you’re buying and what it means because you’re using public money to do it.
Design is more than just about an aesthetic. It’s about function and purpose, too. It’s a primary constituent of our community, and in many ways facilitating the way that we interact with one another. It’s about creativity and innovation and good design that adds value to a community.
Melbourne Design Week will take a closer look at design, building a conversation around some of these ideas, and inviting you to participate in that conversation.
Melbourne Design Week takes place on Thursday 16 – Sunday 26 March 2017.
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