WELCOME
The design scene in Sydney might be more dynamic than ever before, but this does not mean that this ‘scene’ has anything to do with design. Since its beginning eight years ago Sydney Design Week has played a key role in misrepresenting design as a series of small-run expensive artefacts created by inflated egos. The true importance of design, the fact that everything we do everyday depends on designed products, environments and communications, is displaced by Design Week’s focus on styling.
Sydney Design Week 2004 might be the busiest year yet but are the tours, cocktail parties and film screenings anything other than attempts to train consumers in good taste, ensuring that they continue to churn through materials at unsustainable rates? In all the media-friendly hype, who is attempting to critically evaluate what is being put forward as ‘leading edge’? Who is trying to understand the consequences of what is being presented to us as what we should be buying and using?
Who is questioning the current pace and direction of technological change and so opening the way for different sorts of futures, futures designed around how we want live rather than the devices we want to own. Until events dedicated to design become self-critical, design will not come of age. Instead, design will remain synonymous with personalities whinging about lack of recognition.
This is why Change Design, a project of the Society of Responsible Design, has decided to intervene in Sydney Design Week and create the space for alternative accounts of our material cultures. If Sydney Design Week 2004 represents the creativity that defines our world, it is urgent that it use the true power of design to generate something worth celebrating.
DR.
CAMERON TONKINWISE
CHANGE DESIGN
