Design With One Voice

When someone says Australian Design to you, what do you immediately think of? Is it Marc Newson’s iconic three-legged aluminium Lockheed Lounge or Dinosaur Designs’ brightly coloured polyester resin jewellery, or maybe it’s the good old Hills Hoist rotary clothesline? Then there’s the Sydney Opera House, (although as we know that wasn’t designed by an Aussie). You would probably agree that the way in which Australian design is valued by the community, used to represent our national identity or by industry as a problem solving mechanism is pretty underdeveloped in this country. This issue was one of several considered at a major event held at the Sydney Opera House on Friday 3 September to launch the new peak body for design, the Australian Design Alliance (AdA).

The launch took the form of a working meeting bringing together about 100 of the most influential movers and shakers from very broad but pertinent fields, to consider some key questions about the role that design can play in finding solutions to some of Australia’s social, environmental and economic challenges. One of our most respected designers and architects, His Excellency Michael Bryce AM AE (husband of the Governor General), gave the AdA his blessing in an enthusiastic keynote speech, spruiking the virtue of there being a single voice to champion design and ‘design thinking’ in Australia. And that is exactly what the AdA aims to do.

This new grouping, for the first time forges a coalition between all the main industry bodies representing the various aspects of design including architecture, urban and interior design, landscape architecture, graphic, object, industrial and fashion design, and the visual arts, craft and new media. It also includes representatives from the tertiary education sector.

At the Opera House event, ‘design thinking’ was endorsed as a way of reframing problems and using lateral means to solve them. Out of the intense round table discussions that followed a Q & A session, many potent ideas were floated. But the two key recommendations given top priority were: that Australia needs a national design policy; and that design should form an integral part of every person’s education.

While this is the first public appearance of AdA, it has been some months in gestation. At the end of 2008 the Australia Council for the Arts organised a Design Roundtable to ask some key people their views on how they thought the Council should be involved in design. Identifying an evident gap, within weeks, the National Association for the Visual Arts had organised the first meeting of the 10 key design industry bodies for the purpose of forming a new alliance. This group continued to meet over the following 18 months to decide its purpose and mode of operation and define its mission and goals. An intensive day of discussions was held with representatives of design faculties within the tertiary education sector, and a number of meetings organised with funding bodies and with advisers to politicians and government departments, especially in the area of Creative Industries and Innovation.

At the beginning of 2010, the group incorporated as the Australia Design Alliance and sought funding to establish a working base. This proved challenging but by mid-year the NSW Government Department of Industry and Investment had agreed to provide support towards the appointment of an AdA Design Program Manager. This person’s task is to undertake research to survey the Australia and international design field and identify some exemplary projects as well as develop policies using the material generated at the public forum in Sydney, five of which will be brought to a meeting between the design sector and members of the NSW parliament. With the Sydney launch event, this program has begun with a bang.

While a key focus of this work will be to secure the government’s commitment to a national design policy, the current work on a national curriculum for schools offers the opportunity to achieve the second of the priorities identified at the AdA’s launch forum. The arts has been included in Phase 2 of the curriculum work with the proposition that each of the five artforms should be mandated from K to 8 and offered up to year 12. As part of this work, there already have been efforts made by design advocates to have design included within the visual arts stream, recognising that the way it is currently taught as part of Design and Technology does not encompass the breadth and sophistication of an optimum design curriculum.

With the Australian Design Alliance now going public, over the next few months you should start to see Australian design achieve greater public profile. Hopefully, the new Federal Government will be persuaded to adopt and implement a national design policy which will help to foster Australia’s creative industries and give new impetus to Australian goods and services in the national and international marketplace.