Since Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair of 1925 the formula for comfortable seating has been known: create a right-angle, open it up a tad, and tip it backward, so that the seat places the bottom lower than…
Having recently attended my university’s graduation ceremony, I noted again what seems to have become a global trend — design is becoming a field where the majority of practitioners are women. I have made…
In everyday life we are surrounded by a dizzying array of technological gizmos. The ones we love and use the most are often the ones that have been designed with humans firmly in mind. Those that aren’t…
Every Thursday, I go to the Prahran Market in Melbourne and buy, among other things, cut flowers. Since moving into a mid-rise apartment from a flat with a garden, I arrange flowers for my dining room…
It makes perfect sense. If you need to design a new school or playground, who better to help than the children who are going to use it? Gradually, more architects and landscape designers are bringing young…
In 1982, I wrote an introduction to a survey exhibition of the work of Western Australian furniture designer David Foulkes Taylor lamenting that so little attention had “… been directed towards the recording…
What happens when designers stray from familiar territory and go “feral”? This question has been at the forefront of curator Katherine Moline’s mind. She proposes answers in Feral Experimental: New Design…
Having returned recently from a 20 days study-tour plus indigo workshop in India, I have been pondering the social and economic value societies assign to craft. I ask, how is craft valued in Australia…
There’s a perverse irony in the apocryphal tale of the design competition for the Sydney Opera House in 1956. The story goes that, after the selection of the group of finalist designs for the competition…
In the third of my series of interviews with designers and illustrators on collaboration, Hobart-based comic maker and publishing entrepreneur Josh Santospirito discusses self-publishing as a way to grow…
What happens to design when it migrates? This is the question posed by Australian design studio Broached Commissions which opened its latest exhibition, Broached Retreat, at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary…
Designers aim to change peoples’ lives, ideally for the better. The American co-founders of design and development company KickStart, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, set themselves a particularly difficult…
With 3,000 employees, 2,473 points of sale, seven different fashion and furniture labels (to say nothing of his makeup, skincare, chocolate and flower lines), 16 cafés and restaurants, two hotels, a basketball…
A Japanese jeans maker has found a new way of capitalising on zoo animals. Zoo Jeans are producing jeans “designed by dangerous animals”. Denim is wrapped around tyres, which are then thrown to the lions…
We are more likely to thump this instantly recognisable design, on a daily basis, than to give it much thought. The PB/5 pedestrian button, a type of “Audio-Tactile Pedestrian Detector” (ATPD), is a successful…
The Queenslander house is a classic piece of Australian architectural design. With its distinctive timber and corrugated iron appearance, it breaks the monotony of the bland, master-planned display villages…
The Call for Entries is now open for the 62nd annual Australian Book Design Awards which are seeking the “bravest and brightest, the most original and beautiful” books published before December 31, 2013…
Car enthusiasts say the Mini has endured because it is fun - fun to drive and fun to look at. However, as a design, the Mini endures because of how its designers worked within the constraints they were…
Some 33 kilometres outside of Paris, in the town of Poissy, sits a true “design classic”, Villa Savoye. The work of seminal Swiss architect Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye is a constructed experiment, a manifesto…
When we want what we write to be clearly communicated to a reader, we generally try to use a typeface that is clear to read. But few people realise how quickly your choice of typeface affects that process…