This week the National Gallery of Victoria holds the first of a series of four Design Futures talks about the future of design relating to essential areas of daily life: energy, mobility, money and water.
Design Futures will take place over four Wednesday evenings from 21 September to 12 October 2016 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, with each session to include a keynote talk from the featured speaker, followed by a Q&A moderated by The Age columnist and chief editorialist Michael Short.
“Design touches every aspect of our lives and affects the way we live in very fundamental ways, often guiding how we work, learn, spend and interact,” said Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV.
“The NGV is pleased to bring together experts in their fields of to make us consider what might shape the future of energy, mobility, money and water.”
Wednesday 21 September, 6 pm: ENERGY
The journey from high-carbon centralised utilities to low-carbon distributed systems.
Ms Samantha Coras, currently Head of Project Management Australia for the leading global solar energy company First Solar, will speculate on the disruptive design and innovation opportunities that might reshape the ways that energy is captured, stored and valued, as society transitions from high-carbon centralised utilities to low-carbon distributed systems.
Wednesday 28 September, 6 pm: MOBILITY
Radical ideas changing the way we move.
Space craft designer and scramjet engineer Michael Smart will speculate on ways that international travel could be transformed in the years to come, forecasting hypersonic technology and a future of international and space travel. Mr Smart, who is a Professor at the University of Queensland School of Mechanical and Mining, spent 10 years at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia designing hypersonic engines called scramjets.
Wednesday 5 October, 6 pm: MONEY
Globalisation, digitisation – tech start-ups changing the future of money.
The emergence of fin tech businesses and start-ups has radically disrupted financial services and changed the nature of money. Alex Scandurra, the CEO of Stone & Chalk, a not-for-profit fintech hub for financial services start-ups in Australia, will talk about the future of money and what financial services may look like in the future.
Wednesday 12 October, 6 pm: WATER
Water scarcity. A complex problem requiring transformative solutions.
Rosalea Monacella, the co-director of the Office of Urban Transformation Research (OUTR) and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at RMIT University, will elaborate on the issues surrounding water resource availability and discuss how transformative solutions could address future water security issues. OUTR is a network of architects, landscape architects and urban planners that explore design as a responsive agent to contemporary urban challenges, with an intent to generate sustainable urban futures. The network’s research combines complex urban issues and advanced digital modelling techniques as an effective tool for providing effective solutions.
