Design Collaboration Commission Celebrating the opening of the new Geelong Art Centre Geelong Art Centre, Nov 2019, Victoria, AUS.

What can we do in the 21st century to give our students a unique voice? With the ubiquity of images, type and brands circulating at unprecedented speeds we are bombarded with visual stimuli which can have a desensitising effect. To counter this, we are seeking ways to encourage and inspire future generations to be brave, reflexive and critical, to enable design that is impactful and long-lasting. How can our voices of tomorrow generate something new, relevant to their time and meaningful to audiences from diverse backgrounds, cultures and locations? We offer you a peek into our studios, to share processes and generate new collaborations from which creative flow emerges. In this exhibition we celebrate process over outcome, revealing methods that confirm Geelong’s status as a UNESCO City of Design.

The Geelong Arts Centre x Deakin Design exhibition celebrates the collaboration between Geelong Arts Centre and Deakin University third year students studying the Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication). Emerging from an impromptu conversation between Joel McGuinness, Chief Executive Officer of Geelong Arts Centre and myself - Tonya Meyrick, Senior Lecturer in Screen & Design at Deakin University in 2018; the project provided an opportunity for students to work with the revitalised landmark located at the heart of Australia’s only designated UNESCO City of Design. Geelong’s renaissance from an industrial and manufacturing hub to a clever and creative metropolis is aptly demonstrated by the renewal of Geelong Arts Centre. As Geelong creatives become a vital spark in our region, the opportunities for young people to stay and commit to the area flourishes in line with new initiatives, new spaces and new prospects. Here, creatives are not only part of the audience, but more importantly part of the conversation. In this collaboration, students have been afforded agency to experiment with ideas meeting industry standards that contribute to the cycle of redevelopment in Geelong.

Deakin University students were asked to design a contemporary and iconic visual narrative for Geelong Arts Centre’s new co-working studio. Researching for this brief, students actively engaged with the various motivations behind the formation and design of co-working spaces; the importance and role of the audience in 21st century arts centres; as well as identity construction for cultural institutions. By embedding industry requirements into the education setting ideas intermingled with the bodies of design knowledge we contend with sparking new ideas and unique strategies for the student design solutions. Framing this approach to learning in the studio warrants that the skills and knowledge our students cultivate are relevant and marketable and importantly support the world in which we all operate. Giving agency to young people, this collaboration demonstrates to them that they have a role to play in the formation of the world they are embarking on. The concepts they developed inspire the foundations of their own practice, highlighting what is feasible, what is practicable and where there is a place for them.

As the student design artefacts actively engage the notion of the audience, we reflected this by staging the artefacts as a journey to be experienced, as one experiences any performance or artform. The journey commences with this publication design at the entrance to the space greeting the audience who are asked to pick up and interact with the document. The introductory panel and videos on the monitor launch the audience into the visual narrative and pathways to a forest of ideas in the form of bound work-in-progress manuscripts. Inside these records are shared ideation, sketch work, mistakes, processes, visual notations, rough drawings, and drafts. Inviting the audience to engage with these allows a channel into the students’ creative processes. The assorted sized white plinths occupy a space in the studio as a metaphor for the fostering of ideas and the journey through the collaboration. We invite the audience to pick up, hold, flick through and enjoy the design work and research the students conducted in this project. The large format exhibition wall is visually symbolic and iconic, drawing on the shapes, textures, patterns and colours produced by the students. The combination of all these exhibition artefacts celebrate the student’s successes and captures this collaboration as a design led innovation for the 21st century presenting an innovative engagement with Geelong Arts Centre to situating its place as a new landmark in Geelong.