RMIT at Melbourne Design Week 2022

Using the RMIT Design Archives collection as a springboard for the discussion, this session focuses on the changing nature of work and its implication for designing for amenity, flexibility, well-being and the environment.

Post Digital Objects is an exhibition and series of events exploring the future of digital data, memory and healthfulness. The exhibition showcases material artefacts and creative processes to give insights into the research and development possibilities for designing meaningful hybrid objects for health and wellbeing.

After attending the talk, guests can experience the excitement of today’s space missions and the design innovations behind them with a screening of From Dream to Discovery: Inside NASA – a fulldome show presented exclusively for Design Week at the Melbourne Planetarium at Scienceworks. This event will take place at Scienceworks and will also be streamed online. Guests can choose to purchase a ticket to attend in person, or an online ticket to watch the live-stream.

The Australian Institute of Architects is proud to present Symposium – Lost Opportunities. Attendees will engage with some of the most highly regarded architects in the world. Topics will include the practice of architecture today, environment, ideas concerning the global future of the profession and significant projects.

As the demand for urban greening increases in Melbourne, it is becoming increasingly important that data around these spaces is transparently available to the public. Using data journalism and olfactory design, Sensory Garden Lab invites you to create a custom fragrance based on your perceptions of green spaces—juxtaposed against a base formula using current and historical crime and health data. Experience an installation where participants engage with City of Melbourne park data, mapped on to natural fragrances.

AGDA has aligned the works of design business partnerships to showcase their ability to create change for civic good. Two case studies are drawn from the 2021 AGDA Award Winners with a talk from the respective designers and clients involved. We learn about the problem, the process and the outcomes for each of the projects with insight into the collaborative role of design in business. 

For this launch event, author Fleur Watson will introduce the themes, ideas and projects explored in researching and writing The New Curator, a new book that examines the challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas, before a panel discussion with contributors featured in the book.

How can reimagining what is ‘wild’ liberate us from our damaging systems of control? Join a select panel of the editors and contributors behind the latest edition of Kerb – an annual cross disciplinary design journal produced at RMIT University – for a critical discussion of the human/wild binary, empty wilderness, ‘abandonment’ and ‘othering’, as well as emergent practices in designing with wildness and digital tools.

How do landscapes and gardening shape design thinking and practice? In this conversation, architect and educator Leon van Schailk and landscape architect SueAnne Ware discuss the influential landscapes and garden ideas that van Schaik explores in his book, Doing, Seeing; Seeing, Doing—from Persian paradise gardens to the mosaic burning that maintained pre-colonial Australia’s ‘parkland’ landscape, the nested arches of Edwin Lutyens to Renaissance axiality, and his own modest garden in rural Victoria.

The Common Design Studio (previously Global Design Studio) is an international collaborative design sprint that explores global and wicked problems and challenges. For several years the studio has engaged students and lecturers from RMIT University, London College of Communication and Elisava (Barcelona), along with industry and research experts.

Collingwood is known for its history of manufacturing and in recent years as one of Melbourne’s most creative areas. The Collingwood public housing estates are known for its diverse community, including migrants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and its Traditional Owners. The first stage and pilot project called Collingwood Makes involves the design ethnographic mapping of the estates and Collingwood, the building of relationships and networks into the estate, and the tangible outcomes of furniture to be used by the community that reflect community values.

Some Alchemies [heavy breathing] is an exhibition that brings together contemporary art and interior design practices using materiality, installation and performance actions. The exhibition conceives that matter, in all of their processes, have no past, present or emergent future; that they are immersed in time as flow, and endlessly becoming. 

Urban Undercurrents is an interdisciplinary performative laboratory that roams the city tracing the human and more-than-human entanglements of what lies beneath the city and its culture.

peckvonhartel and Steelcase collaborate in an installation and talk series that explores the intersection between ‘Civic Good’ and ‘Making Good’. The talk series consisted of two intimate panel discussions spread across two evenings in the Steelcase showroom.

This public conversation explored the potential of architecture and design integrity to facilitate social and cultural reconciliation measures. This panel discussion considered how we can reimagine our engagement with the built environment across daily working practices, and how design can nurture more effective community and collaborative work models. Panellists representing Australia’s First Nations, education and design communities were invited to reflect on how architecture can inspire workplace leaders to review their business-as-usual practices in contributing to the creation of more engaged and cohesive cities.

How can educators and designers begin to decolonise architectural education, particular the design studio environment, to create a new narrative of civic and community good? Architectural education is deeply implicated with processes of colonisation and the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. How might architectural education and design studios be decolonised? Despite calls for inclusiveness, by non-Indigenous educators there is at the heart of many architecture and design histories, a focus on settler progress. Settler progress is often lurking in the plethora of narratives, histories and precedents in our design schools. This panel brought together a diverse group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators and practitioners with the hope of truly decolonising design curricula. The panel included architects, landscape architects, urban theorists, designers and artists actively working to decolonise design education.