The Things We Made Next Past Event
How can designers orient their practice towards care and community? How do they work when the traditional designer-client relationship is disrupted? Can designers democratise their practice and embody interconnectedness?
In 2020, 250 future-building participants came together with 40 artists, thinkers and provocateurs for Assembly for the Future to envision, describe and explore the year 2029 from which 50 Dispatches from the Future were generated.
The Things We Made Next is a virtual and poster exhibition on the streets of Melbourne – five commissioned works from established and emerging designers, each responding to one of these multi-artform Dispatches. The collection connects the social and the political and simultaneously questions conventional modes of practice, whilst embedding designers in collective visions from the future.
VIEW THE VIRTUAL EXHIBITION: www.thethingswedidnext/made-next/
POSTER LOCATIONS: online map here
- St Kilda – 202 Carlisle Street
- Prahran – 394 Chapel Street
- East Melbourne – 2A Bridge Rd (near cnr Bridge & Punt)
- Collingwood – Cnr Smith & Otter Streets
- Fitzroy – 276 Brunswick Street
- Brunswick – 266 Sydney Road
ARTISTS TALK: Tomorrow’s thoughts, Today’s possibilities
Commissions can be viewed in realtime and space at RAFT artspace, Alice Springs in April, and Phee Broadway Theatre, Castlemaine in May.
The Things We Did Next is a collaboration of Not Yet It’s Difficult & Something Somewhere Inc, curated David Pledger & Alex Kelly, working with co-curator Elliat Rich for The Things We Made Next.
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.
Alex Kelly - Curator, The Things We Did Next
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.
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.
Elliat Rich - Curator, Art Direction
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.
Sophia Marinos - Producer, The Things We Did Next
Sophia Marinos is a creative producer living and working on Gadigal lands 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 art and creative practice to spearheadign positive social change.