Global Design
Conference

Please be seated by 8:30am. Te Aroha Grace leads the karakia, then our MC introduces our six speakers and how the day runs. Restore + Reimagine asks what design is responsible for holding together: people, place, and the things we keep. The opening puts that question in front of the room before the first keynote at 9am.

Most sustainability work starts after the drawing is finished. Stefan Diez argues the leverage sits earlier, in the contract. His Circular Design Contract is a proposal to tie a product's value to use, durability and return rather than units shipped. It grows out of twenty years of products, from BOA for HAY to AYNO for Midgard, that tried to build repair and return into the design, and out of the realisation that products alone will not get us there. He brings TRIANGOLO, a system his studio has just fully reworked, as the first place the thinking gets applied.

Fashion is built around a single name and a recognisable signature. Jordan Gogos runs the opposite model. Since founding Iordanes Spyridon Gogos in 2019 he has shown at Australian Fashion Week every year since 2021, building collections from found, recycled and repurposed material, and treating collaboration as the production method rather than a marketing device. His Powerhouse runway involved more than 50 collaborators, including architects, musicians, florists and students. He has never stocked a store. What that model costs him, what it gives back, and why he keeps choosing it, is the session. Headshot Image: Photo by Georges Antoni courtesy of Paillion Arts Program

Marcelis works in resin, glass and stone, where colour and light are not applied to a material but decided inside it. The relationship runs both ways. What a process will allow determines what gets made, and what gets made determines what the studio learns to do next. Across one-off works, exhibition design and commissions for manufacturers producing at scale, the same question sits underneath. Who is leading, the designer or the material.

Designing something new is the easy brief. Lee Gibson’s was harder: take an object people already love and change it without breaking what they love about it. He led the team that recrafted the Golden Era shape of the Air Max 1 for its thirtieth anniversary, a silhouette with three decades of opinion attached to it. The route there ran through architecture, eight years teaching, and an MFA in interior design, before Nike and then Jordan Brand. What transfers between those disciplines, and what the restoration brief actually demands, is the session.