For the past few days I’ve been collaborating with artificial intelligence to design a range of furniture and homewares. It started when I saw a friend’s post on Instagram “Here’s some digital art experiments I’ve been working on with Midjourney. I could use this paragraph to talk about the vast implications of AI in art but instead I’m just gonna hit you with some silly captions” -Stackhat

The portraits were wild, they were hyper realistic surrealism, but beyond this they had an unfamiliar feeling to them.

“What’s Midjourney?” I asked
“I’ll send you an invite” he replied 

Midjourney is an AI bot where you feed in text and it spits out ............

Over the past 7 years I've been undertaking a PhD to develop a new social design process. Publications that detail the approach are coming soon but here is brief summary of the intentions

Re-authoring Design is a social design process that builds on the theory and practice of narrative therapy. It is intended to be used by designers and communities to co-create objects and spaces that promote social growth. The process departs design’s traditional focus on problem solving and approaches change through a narrative lens, supporting communities to ‘re-author’ the stories that define their identity and reality. This is approached through:  

The process

Co-design is approached as a transformative process ...

The My Plate Your Plate food carts are now roving events around Sydney! 

My Plate Your Plate is a social design project that brings refugee and asylum seeker communities together with Inner West residents to exchange recipes and stories about food and culture. (The project was initiatedby Inner West Council but involved many collaborators that are listed below).    

Using co-design as a space for community to connect meaningfully and share lesser known stories:  

My Plate Your Plate began before covid, each week the group met at the Refugee Welcome centre in Callan park, each session 2 people would cook as the rest of us gathered in the kitchen watching closely, we built friendships and learnt great ...

A portrait of my friends heading off to a picnic. Scary times. #climateaction

The Callan Park Tapestry Couch is finished!
It will be on display at the Balmain Edge Festival Nov 23-24, at the Community Refugee Welcome Centre in Callan Park.
This will be part of the Persian Coffee House installation, which is a whole weekend of performances, films, events, and delicious coffee ��
https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/explore/whats-on…

The Tapestry Couch project is running again!

As part of the Open Inner West Cultural program the Inner West Council have facilitated the project to run again, this time at the Callan Park Refugee Welcome Centre.

The project ran in a similar way, with a day of storytelling between local residents and people who had recently arrived in Australia. Together they shared stories about the things that they wanted to be represented in the design.

This included stories and symbols of home on one side and on the other a scene representing Callan Park.

The Harbour bridge representing the journey here and a strong icon that many people had in their minds before arriving in Sydney. 

The tapestry was made during 5 months of workshops at the Welcome Centre, facilitated by Sayd and his wife Nazifa, and supported by Raffaela Cavadini (Community Arts Project Officer), Moones Mansoubi (Refugee Welcome Centre Coordinator) and Ingrid deMeyer – (Community Projects Coordinator).

Mehran and I then worked together to build the couch. This time I developed a design made form CNC cut plywood, with the intentino of making easier to run the project again!    

The Tapestry couch is a community project that aims to celebrate the stories, skills and knowledges of the Sydney refugee community and open space for a diverse group of people to sit together, make together and form new connections.more info about the first project can be found HERE.

At the Design Innovation Research Centre we’ve been designing spaces to host challenging legal negotiations. There’s been a NSW reform that introduced mandatory pre-court case conferences for some type of offences. These are negotiations between defendants, their lawyers and prosecution. These are complex conversations that involve difficult decisions, people negotiating in person and through video link and situations where people can’t see or hear each other. We've been exploring the way that design can support people in these challenging situations.

More info to come. 

Nuebar is an exciting new line of natural body products. Their mission is to remove all single use plastic from the bathroom by creating shampoo, conditioner, body wash and facewash in bar form. I’ve been working with them to detail the bar forms and design the soup moulds. It's been a pleasure working with the duo, a naturopath and a typographer. What has resulted is a wonderful product with incredible attention to detail. 

As part of Sydney Design Festival we're exhibiting the Play Up project at the Australian Design Centre. This project was a collaboration with Jean-Paul Bell, making a range of props to assist performers using humour to stimulate memory in dementia care. I caught up with the Australian Design Centre to talk about the project and reflect on the practice of Social Design.

The conversation can be found HERE.    

It is now common for defendants to appear in court via video from a correctional centre. Making sure the encounter works well means more than a reliable technical connection, for remote defendants the court atmosphere, rituals and subtle interactions can be lost. And for the Judiciary and legal practitioners, even with higher levels of training, viewing a remote defendant from prison may influence the way that person is perceived.

At the Design Innovation Research Centre we conducted a deep design research project exploring these interactions, with the intention of improving the interaction between all parties and moving towards fairer and respectful experiences of justice.  

A large part of this study involved redesigning the ...