Melbourne: Design City?

The Atrium, Federation Square

It’s just gone dark and the sound of music and voices floats into the room from the streets below, bringing a bit of the city’s energy into this bright and quiet space. Outside, the sharp angles of Federation Square are softened by movement as people gather and depart; once just a piece of design, it is now firmly embedded in the life and culture of the city.Inside, a far smaller part of Melbourne’s design culture sits on shelves and tables in neatly arranged displays.

This is the studio of Tim Fleming, an artist and designer who makes objects that are part sculpture, part ornament and part artwork: oversized hands and mirrored OK signs, trees toppled over by wind, clouds pouring out rain, green clovers and wooden acorns, world maps, words and tiny restless figures.

This is where design begins. All over the city there are people bent over their desks, pouring themselves into the projects that ultimately make Melbourne the vibrant, creative place that it is.

Anyone who’s ever wandered around the CBD will have seen the extent to which design has filtered into our culture. Look up on Higson Lane and see a colourful light box taking the piss out of celebrity. Glance down any other alley and there may be a bulging brick wall, or a stairway to nowhere, or a chandelier strung between two buildings like a discarded piece of bling.

There are buildings shaped like honeycomb and ones that are so mesmerisingly shiny and golden in the afternoon they make driving downright dangerous. Everywhere shop windows taunt us with their beauty and cause us to walk around in a stupor with a bagful of things we never intended to buy.

We are literally encased in design. Of course, there’s nowhere on earth that isn’t. People are unavoidably creative, and since we stopped being monkeys (and perhaps even before) we have designed things to make our lives better and easier.

So what does a city have to do to be bestowed with the label ‘design city’?

For starters, a design culture can never expand and thrive if the government doesn’t recognise the importance of design and make it a priority. In Berlin, one of the six cities named a ‘City of Design’ by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, the State has worked closely with design leaders to establish trend-setting trade fairs and festivals, set up creative centres, coaching programs and workshops, and funds such as the Venture Capital Fund, which devotes its €30 million (AU$50 million) budget to financing and supporting the creative sector.

In Montreal, another UNESCO City of Design, the city aims to use design to improve the quality of life of its citizens and inspire people to participate in making their environments better and more liveable.

One program that is doing just that is Commerce Design Montreal, an annual competition that rewards the businesses that best improve their interior design and bring it into harmony with what’s around them. As well as creating many more cool places for people to go, it has revitalised entire neighbourhoods and brought design well and truly into the public focus. As the city said in its UNESCO application, ‘design in Montreal is not simply for show but a source of daily well-being.’

A city must embrace both of these approaches to be truly successful as a design city. It’s not enough to throw a bit of money at design and hope to see it contribute to the economy. It must also be about creating an environment that people want to be in, stimulating people creatively and intellectually, providing new experiences and generally improving the liveability of the city as a whole.

Light box, Higson Lane

Does the Victorian government stack up? They have certainly recognised the importance of design, having established Design Victoria, a resource and training organisation, and created the Victorian Innovation Strategy, but the primary concern with these is increasing the competitiveness and profitability of Victoria’s design sector, not adding to the design culture in a meaningful way.

Take Melbourne’s trams. In addition to being the biggest consumer of trams in the world, trams are inextricably linked to Melbourne’s identity. They feature in our advertising, our postcards and our news programs. They are a big draw for visitors and are part of the daily life of many of the city’s residents. But are they designed or made here? No – we import all our trams from Europe.

The State government likes to say Melbourne is a world-class design city, yet they ignore the opportunity to truly own one of our icons and bring it into the 21st century.

To give them their due, they do support a number of excellent creative endeavours, such as The Melbourne Design Guide, the State of Design Festival (run through Design Victoria) and other events with design elements such as the Fringe Festival, but it seems that the government is far more interested in cultivating an image of Melbourne as the cool, sophisticated design city rather than using design to add value to the lives of the people who live here.

The most obvious form of design in any city is its architecture, and in the last decade in particular many interesting structures have sprung up both in the city centre and in outlying areas. But according to Paul Charlwood, founder of the Melbourne Design Guide and Creative Director of Charlwood Design, this doesn’t make Melbourne stand out. ‘Melbourne has a lot of nice buildings, but everyone’s doing that,’ he says. If Melbourne is a design city, then it is in a smaller, more individual sense; the ‘dirt under the fingernails,’ as Paul puts it.

Melbourne does have a lot of dirt. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), most of it seems to be found in the city’s cracks and crevices: in the alleys and laneways, the old buildings, the arcades and rooftops. These places are Melbourne, filled both with the creative energy of working artists and designers and the stores, cafés and bars that give the city its distinct atmosphere and personality.

No city could even hope to be a city of design without having a significant number of people out there actually creating things. And it’s not enough for governments to encourage design, either; there must be people working on a grassroots level to introduce design into the community. In Melbourne, these are the people who set up and participate in all the markets and design events, who create zines and independent publications, who start labels and set up shops, who build, draw and make, who exhibit their work and bring their art onto the streets.

This is what makes design exciting and accessible, drawing public attention and interest to a field that traditionally has not been interesting to very many people.

People are starting to care more about design (as the attendance figures for July’s Design Festival show) but there are still many things holding Melbourne’s design culture back. Unlike Europe, where there are bigger markets, bigger companies and far more design organisations, designers and makers here often have to do the whole process, from design to manufacture, themselves, with little support and no guarantee that people will buy the product at the end.

However desirable handmade items may be to the consumer, it is not a profitable business. Without sizeable local manufacturers, designers have to take their business offshore or, in the case of independent craftspeople, spend a lot of their time simply making things, leaving less time to come up with new ideas and develop their brand.

These things aren’t all bad, however. Being so remote means Australia isn’t as influenced by what other people are doing as they are in Europe. Much of our originality is derived from this geographical quirk. There are also far less regulations here than in Europe, creating a culture where, according to Charlwood, ‘anything goes’.

In many ways Melbourne has the best of both worlds. The city is a lively, exciting place but it still manages to keep a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. It’s big enough to have lots of different things to discover but small enough that it retains a sense of intimacy. The climate is cold enough to encourage creativity but not so cold that it makes life difficult.

Melbourne Design Market

A big part of Melbourne’s uniqueness also comes from the ‘Australian lifestyle’ that politicians always refer to in their speeches. It’s not all hot air. People here are generally pretty friendly, with the wonderful self-deprecating humour that makes it easy to engage with strangers and not take things too seriously.

Design in Melbourne may still in the developing stage, but there are a few areas that we have long been recognised to excel in. The quality of the jewellery program at RMIT has produced many of the country’s most renowned jewellers, many of whom have become hot commodities on the international art and design scene. Melbourne is also well known for the quality of its fashion designers, with some talented people, such as Toni Maticevski and Bettina Liano, being elevated to the elite world of high fashion.

The best thing about Melbourne’s design scene, however, is that it is focused on locals. The government made the mistake in the 80s of getting big international names to come do buildings in the CBD (the former version of Melbourne Central, for example) and it added nothing to the city; since then, the majority of projects have been designed and built by local companies.

To paraphrase Leon van Schaik, a prominent figure in Melbourne’s architectural world, cities only become design cities when they nurture local creativity, not when they import great works from elsewhere.

So, is Melbourne a design city? Maybe. Maybe not. It is a sufficiently vague term to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. But who really cares. Melbourne is full of creative, determined individuals who are constantly shaping and reshaping the forms, sights and sounds of the city, allowing the rest of us to be surprised and delighted (or shocked and unimpressed) at what people come up with. There is always something new. In the end, labels are meaningless. It is what people experience that really matters.