Art school stars in design celebration

Image: The Visible Archive - visualisation of the collection of the National Archives of Australia (2008) by Mitchell Whitelaw.

Image: The Visible Archive - visualisation of the collection of the National Archives of Australia (2008) by Mitchell Whitelaw.

 
The ANU School of Art is again taking a starring role in Canberra’s annual celebration of design.
 
The DESIGN Canberra Festival, supported by the School and the College of Arts and Social Sciences, features a bonanza of staff, students and alumni who will open their studios, showcase their work, and explore ideas around their practice.
 
A key event, Digital / Material: A Conversation on Contemporary Design & Making, is organised by the co-convenors of the new ANU Design program, Associate Professor Mitchell Whitelaw and Dr Geoff Hinchcliffe. In assembling the panel, they hand-picked practitioners across design practices from ceramics and graphic design to architecture.
 
Giovanna Massoni, an Italian freelance art and design journalist and independent design consultant, will chair the panel.
 
Geoff and Mitchell described the forum as a conversation about the digital and how it interacts with the material. 
 
“Digital tech has transformed the way we experience and create culture,” Mitchell says.
 
“Every form of design and making is supported, enabled, shaped by digital tools. 
 
“With every aspect of commercial work and professional practice, you’re either designing something that is digital – an app or website, for instance – or something that may have a material outcome – such as a building – but it passes through chains of digital manipulation and design.”
 
At the heart of the conversation is the theme that design is a two-way dialogue. 
 
“It’s a rich interaction between digital and material processes and how they speak to each other in interesting ways,” Mitchell says.
 
Geoff adds that what it isn’t is “Command+print" - referencing the Mac keyboard shortcut for printing a document.
 
He referenced one of the panellists, Ben Landau, whose studio Alterfact works with ceramics in a way that embodies this thinking.
 
“They built their own 3D printer that works with wet clay.” 
 
But where traditional 3D printing aims to produce perfect copies of a digital model, Alterfact’s printer embraces the richness and unpredictability of its material. 
 
“It will never print the same thing twice. Every version of a pot is always unique because of the material itself,” Geoff says.
 
Geoff and Mitchell are also involved with Creative Careers, hosted by Radford College. Mitchell says they will be speaking about the new ANU Design program and how it’s preparing designers to be adaptable to changes happening in that field.
 
“Design practice is changing and our program is about responding to that change.”
 
Head of the School of Art’s Gold and Silversmithing workshop, Dr Rohan Nicol, played a major role in organising Luminary: Remembering Robert Foster, which honours the late ANU alumnus and Canberra arts community giant.
 
Rohan, a DESIGN Canberra committee member, stated that the exhibition isn’t a retrospective, but a recognition of Robert as a luminary.
 
“It’s a timely, nice gesture,” he says.
 
“With DESIGN Canberra as the mechanism for us to do that, as a community, I think it’s going to be really successful.”
 
The festival, Rohan says, is part of a longer term strategy by Craft ACT to have Canberra recognised as a global city of design “in the way Adelaide is a city of music”.
 
“It’s an effort to communicate into the wider community that there is a genuine expertise and activity here – that we have a leadership role to play in the national design scene.” 
 
Associate Professor Richard Whiteley, Head of the ANU Glass Workshop, says the School has built much of that pool of expertise.
 
“If you look at entities like ANCA and the Canberra Glassworks, those exist precisely because of the graduates that have come out of this place for decades.”
 
He adds DESIGN Canberra and the School operating in parallel. 
 
“They’re finally acknowledging the depth of design thinking that’s already existing,” he says. 
 
“The standard of making in this city is extraordinary. It’s a wonderful idea of celebrating innovation that’s embedded in this city.”
 
DESIGN Canberra runs 27 October to 25 November.
 
 
Highlights of School of Art in DESIGN Canberra