When?  6.30pm, Wednesday 1 April

Where?  Carpark under Westpac Bank, 89-91 Boundary Street, West End.

What? Rethinking the Future of Design

In this session, designers Chenoa Pettrup, Bec Barnett, Lennah Kuskoff, Christine Moulder and Tristan Shulz will explore the role that design has played in the development and maintenance of the unsustainable world that we inhabit. By recognising design as contributive to global unsettlement and unsustainability, serious discussions are developing about what constitutes a responsible design practice. One future for design will be explored through discussion on design as a ‘redirective practice’.

We will explain redirective practice via a case study that critiques the Queensland Plan and its failure to recognise the future scenario’s Queensland is facing. Redirective practice aims to raise the level of debate around those measures of success that are ignoring, or adhering to defuturing conditions of structural unsustainability. This unsustainability is clearly present in SEQ and the wider Asia-Pacific region, manifesting in forms such as climate change, climate refugees, long-term viability of agriculture and the effects of globalisation. All are in need of mitigation, adaptation and/or redirection at not just technical, but social, cultural, economic and ontological levels; that is at levels of questioning our very mode of being-in-the-world.

Through the Queensland Plan case study we will provide examples of the design thinking and strategic methods we have used to begin designing future scenarios where Queensland takes future challenges into broader consideration. In this, design (whether as redirective practice or in its traditional instrumentally perceived mode) is recognised as a political act, one that cannot escape agency.

About the speakers:

Chenoa Pettrup is a freelance graphic designer, Design Lounge Coordinator for the Asia Pacific Design Library at the State Library of Queensland and a tutor in the Visual Communication Design department at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art.

Bec Barnett is a designer, researcher and upholster she currently works as a lecturer and tutor in the Design Futures program at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Lennah Kuskoff is a designer, educator and food enthusiast, she works as an instructor and tutor in the Design Futures program at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art.

Christine Moulder is a designer and researcher as well as a tutor in the Design Futures program at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art and course coordinator at the Queensland Institute of Business and Technology.

Tristan Schultz is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher and Convenor of Visual Communication Design in the Design Futures Program at QCA, Griffith University. Tristan is currently a panel member of the Australia Council for the Arts as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Strategy Panel Member.

This is an open, inclusive and family-friendly event. All welcome!