Tomorrow’s Thoughts, Today’s Possibilities Past Event
For this panel discussion, Alex K, our Keeper of Time, will transport us between the design states of 2021 and 2029, while curator, Elliat Rich will deliver a Dispatch from the Future. Hear from them, together with The Things We Made Next designers, as they share insights and reflections across time, space, politics and community.
This discussion complements The Things We Made Next, a virtual and poster exhibition on the streets of Melbourne showcasing the work of five designers who have engaged with future visions collaboratively imagined by hundreds of artists, thinkers and provocateurs during Assembly for the Future 2020. Their brief was to design an object that brings these visions into, or closer to, being.
Elliat Rich - First Speaker
Elliat uses a design process to produce creative outcomes. She works in flat, dimensioned and virtual design spaces for a diverse client base, remotely, locally and nationally. All processes align with an ethical imperative to practice equity and increase equality within and across species.
Alex K - Keeper of Time
Alex is an organiser and artist committed to social and climate justice who has worked in film, theatre, communications and troublemaking in many forms. Through practising the art of imagination, Alex hopes to strengthen our ability to tackle the complex challenges we face by imagining more just futures.
Alison Page - Designer for the Future
Alison is a descendant of the Walbanga and Wadi Wadi people from La Perouse. She is an award-winning creative championing the creative expression of Aboriginal identity in interiors, public art, urban design and film.
Damien Wright - Designer for the Future
Damien is an award winning Melbourne craftsman working with Australian timbers, traditional joinery techniques, organic finishes and contemporary design. Represented internationally in public and private collections, Damien seeks to explore the beauty and bounty of the Australian landscape through furniture and sculpture.
Ella Cutler - Designer for the Future
Ella is a recently graduated designer, thinker and publisher interested in ways design tools can help to navigate small protest ecologies and their complex contexts. As a queer woman, her design practice has always sought to navigate the contested and entangled spaces of a heteronormative world.
Su san Cohn - Designer for the Future
Su san is an artist with multiple personalities – jeweller, craftswoman, designer, industrialist, curator, writer. Living in Naarm, Melbourne, she has been making work for over 35 years exhibiting extensively in Australia and internationally. Working across the art-craft-design divide, Cohn’s research-based and collaborative process brings a conceptual approach to her work together with an interest in contemporary culture and technology.
Tessa Zettel - Designer for the Future
Tessa works collaboratively between disciplines as an artist, designer, writer and researcher to imagine and enact other ways of living. Her participatory projects respond to the contexts in which they occur, using a kind of fabulist archaeology to make visible contested histories & possible futures.
David Pledger - Curator, The Things We Did Next
David is an award-winning contemporary artist, curator, cultural commentator and thinker working at the intersection of the performing, visual and media arts.
Sophia Marinos - Producer, The Things We Did Next
Sophia Marinos is a creative producer living and working on Gadigal Country in inner Sydney, who has worked in diverse areas of social justice and the arts, both internationally and locally, and across artforms. She is passionate about the strategic application of art and creative practice to spearhead positive social change.