Design. Regret. Confess.
Presented by Chris Speed, Liam Fennessy
DETAILS
Free, no booking required
The venue is in the back of a small truck. This will be parked in legal parking spots adjacent to MDW events and activities.
DATES
Thu 15 May 11am – 6pm
Fri 16 May 11am – 6pm
Sat 17 May 11am – 6pm
Sun 18 May 11am – 6pm
Mon 19 May 11am – 6pm
Tue 20 May 11am – 6pm
Wed 21 May 11am – 6pm
Thu 22 May 11am – 6pm
Fri 23 May 11am – 6pm
Sat 24 May 11am – 6pm
Sun 25 May 11am – 6pm
ACCESS
Design. Regret. Confess. is an installation that transforms a very small delivery truck into a mobile confession booth for the design community. Hidden in plain sight, this installation will visit various Melbourne Design Week locations to provide a small space to purge the messier, often concealed realities, of professional practice. This will act as a counter discourse to design as an instrument of value creation and the designer as problem solver. The confessional serves as a sanctuary for design’s dirty secrets, where practitioners can anonymously confess their professional disasters, ethical compromises, and moments of spectacular failure. Using AI-powered voice recognition, these confessions are captured and carefully anonymised before being broadcast once on a stark digital display before disappearing.
Operating throughout the festival, the installation collects stories ranging from catastrophic oversights to moral grey areas and shame: creating a powerful testament to design’s capacity for both triumph and disaster. These confessions will be compiled into a limited-edition publication Design. Regret. Confess: An Honest Archive to be printed as the confessions are made using UV unstable ink on paper. This temporary document acts as a metaphor for both the erasure of failures, and the largely ephemeral nature of design outputs. The project collects and features anonymous contributions from Melbourne’s design community in a participatory way and from local and international practitioners’ via a website. It aims to make space to explore the tensions between design’s polished exteriors and its dirty interiors: the things we are disinclined to divulge in public.
Participants
Chris Speed
Chris Speed is Professor of Design for Regenerative Futures at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia, where he collaborates with a wide variety of communities and partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt toward becoming a regenerative society. Chris has an established track record in directing large complex grants and educational programmes with academic, industry and third sector partners, that apply design and data methods to social, environmental and economic challenges. He confesses to working on a serial killers publishing project involving contacting the killers family members.
Liam Fennessy
A/Prof Fennessy supervises Doctoral candidates, teaches undergraduate industrial design students and undertakes academic leadership activities at RMIT University. His research has two key foci: on design pedagogy and practice; and on design projects that deal with questions of sustainability and de-materialisation. Current projects include design collaborations and in the conservation science, design for circularity, and health fields. He confesses to deliberately naming a research project Cognitive Bias Testing Devices for Lactating Sows purely for his own entertainment.
Miek Dunbar
Miek Dunbar is a lecturer in the School of Design at RMIT University. He is an interaction design practitioner and researcher specialising in the design of meaningful interactions with data and information to support social and ecological action. He confesses to spending over a week of the client’s budget composing background muzak in GarageBand for a website.