Bold + Brave: the first Auckland Design Week theme

Every festival needs a north star, and for our first year we chose a demanding one. Bold + Brave was our curatorial theme for 2024, and it worked on two levels at once. It was a provocation to the design community, to be braver in the work, and it was an honest description of a festival attempting, in its first year, something the city had not seen at this scale.

A theme, and a dare

Bold + Brave was not decoration on a programme cover. It set the brief for the work. The phrase recurred through the week because we kept asking people to live up to it: to choose colour over caution, to commit to a material, to make a permanent decision and stand behind it. In a design culture that often defaults to safe, the theme was a gentle dare with a serious point underneath.

Braver with the permanent choices

The clearest expression of the theme was a conversation about nerve. At Tile Space, three designers named Alex, Fulton, McLeod and Walls, sat down for In conversation with the Alex’s, on being bold or brave with the choices you cannot easily undo. Painting a wall is reversible. A patterned tile, a coloured tap, a profiled wall panel is not, and that is exactly where confidence is tested. At 159Design, the panel Encouraging Bold + Brave Design took the same idea to the client relationship, asking how a designer coaxes someone past white on white toward something with a point of view. The theme, in other words, was not about being loud. It was about being sure.

Colour, out loud

Where the panels argued for bravery, the activations demonstrated it. Signature Floors handed its floor to the Resene Colour Challenge, with Art Battle painters working live and fast against a limited palette, colour as performance. Our collaborative table, built by more than 40 studios, ran on the same logic: each studio was given a plain white on white cardboard plinth and asked to transform it into anything but the white canvas it was, and the diversity of Bold + Brave tops was set against a deliberately neutral base. Even the food joined in, with a banquet dressed to the theme and a private chef preparing Bold + Brave plates directly on a benchtop to prove the endurance of Cosentino’s stone. The point kept landing the same way. Restraint has its place, but this was a week for the other thing.

A festival that took its own advice

The most Bold + Brave thing at Auckland Design Week 2024 may have been the festival itself. Brought to market in a matter of months, run across seven days at a scale with no local precedent since the Urbis era, it was a go big or go home year by our own description. Choosing Bold + Brave as the theme was therefore a kind of promise we made to ourselves, and then tried to keep. A fortnight on, it holds up. We asked our community to be braver, and we did our best to lead by example.