Melbourne Design Week 2021 - Care, Community & Climate
Unlucky with the first wave of the pandemic hitting the city, Melbourne Design Week had to shortened last year’s edition. But looking at its 2021 iteration, it returns bigger and better than ever.
In 2021, Melbourne Design Week explores the theme ‘design the world you want’ where designers demonstrate how they can collaborate to create a better and healthier future for the planet.
Over eleven days (March 26th - April 5th), the festival presents emerging and established designers to address the theme in an array of talks, tours, workshops, exhibitions and launches across Melbourne and Victoria. Through this, it celebrates the diversity of the Australian design and architectural sector offering both industry professionals and design enthusiasts the opportunity to engage with individuals, institutions and practices at the vanguard of design world-wide.
Melbourne Design Week is ideas-driven. Designers respond to this provocation through three pillars: Care, Community and Climate. Events under the Care thematic reflect the desire for design processes that consider the emotional needs of others, including other species; Community celebrates collaboration across disciplines, disseminating knowledge and embracing new cultures; and Climate examines the ways in which designers can mediate the effects of climate change, including the necessary shift to a zero-carbon future.
The design festival is complimented by specially curated programmes: Melbourne Art Book Fair, Melbourne Design Week Film Festival and Waterfront.
The extensive Waterfront program, presented by Centre for Architecture Victoria | Open House Melbourne, extends to Lakes Entrance and Lake Tyers in 2021 with the School for unTourists. Exploring the future for this post-fishing community, audiences will be introduced to sites around the lakes district through a series of walks, tours, talks, kayak and boat trips; and hear about the issues affecting the waterways of the Gippsland Lakes from the perspectives of Traditional Owners, local community members, designers, artists and marine experts.
Melbourne Design Week offers to its visitors the possibility to learn more about indigenous design.
Tour - KHT Collection Tour with Peter Waples-Crowe
The Koorie Heritage Trust’s artworks and objects collection contain over 3,900 items (within its overall collection of 65,000 material items), including historic artefacts and contemporary artworks ranging from boomerangs, shields, spear throwers, clubs, canoes, baskets, eel traps and possum-skin cloaks to carved emu eggs, ceramics, t-shirts, jewellery and sculpture.
Join Ngarigo artist Peter Waples-Crowe for a rare glimpse inside the collection room of the Koorie Heritage Trust where the objects and artworks that form part of their unique and important collection are cared for and stored. Through livestream video, this free tour celebrates how Koorie culture continues to evolve, and how lessons from the KHT collection can inform contemporary and future design thinking. In the presentation, Waples-Crowe introduces established cultural skills in crafts, designs and the layers of stories reflected in these works. Important cultural knowledge and skills are being used across a wide range of contemporary media, demonstrating how materials and crafts have adapted and changed over time. They also focus on collection objects that have resonance and meaning to them as an artist as a way of introduction to the breadth of the collection.
Presented by The Koorie Heritage Trust on Monday, March 29th at 1pm
Workshop - Reframe: The Seven Grandfathers Teaching As An Indigenous Design Process
In this workshop the Seven Grandfathers Teachings, will be presented as an Indigenous design process participants can apply to and reflect on for their own projects. The Seven Grandfathers Teachings as a design process are iterative and non-linear, they have relationality between each other even though the holistic process can take designers to step one to seven.
This 2-hour Indigenous co-design workshop scaffolds how design frames and reframes a situation to support Indigenous knowledge systems and support the work of imagining new tomorrows and today such as decolonising and Indigenising design.
Presented by Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga & Howard Munroe on Tuesday, March 30th at 10am.
Panel Discussion - Reframe: Weaving Indigenous Perspectives in Design (Australia, New Zealand and Mexico)
If you think of design as a relational practice, how might Indigenous knowing shape how we are in relation to country, to time, to community, to materials? This panel discussion begins with a short overview of the designers’ experiences engaging with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, weaving different perspectives from across design education, research and professional practice.
In this session, we will explore the embodied, situated, social, speculative and reflective orientation of design as a relational practice that can learn from and be deepened by an acknowledgment of Indigenous knowing and being. Part of the reFrame program, this online panel discussion will explore how an Indigenous lens can productively reframe colonial or modernist perspectives on design research, education and professional practice. Reference to existing Indigenous methodologies, research projects and case studies will frame the conversation before opening up for an interactive discussion.
Presented by Dr Tristan Schultz, Professor Lisa Grocott and Dr Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga on Wednesday, March 31st at 5pm.
An initiative of the Victorian Government and delivered by the National Gallery of Victoria, the inaugural Melbourne Design Week was launched in 2017. The programme has grown in scope and scale from just under 100 programmes in 2017 to over 300 in 2020 making it Australia’s largest international design event.
