TDF Awards Trophies

The story behind our one-of-a-kind awards trophies

Photo – Eve Wilson Art Direction – Annie Portelli Production –The Design Files

The Design Files worked with Melbourne glass artist Amanda Dziedzic to create the spectacular trophies for each of our 12 award winners.

Our working relationship with Amanda first started in 2011, when she contributed a sell-out series of her distinctive glass bonsai to our first ever TDF Open House event.

Eight years later, we’ve come full circle, with Amanda crafting these exquisite keepsakes for the winners in our inaugural design awards program.

Referencing the distinctive colour palettes associated with each of the award categories, Amanda designed these one-of-a-kind masterpieces in collaboration with our art director, Annie Portelli, and editor, Lucy Feagins.

While Amanda has been honing her craft for almost a decade, the intensely layered, multicoloured effect presented a new challenge that took months of experimentation to perfect. ‘These pieces aren’t about form, they’re all about colour’, Amanda tells. ‘I wanted them to look sort of painterly’.

Despite the extensive experimentation process, there’s still a high degree of chance left in the final forms. Amanda explains, ‘I had an idea of what I wanted them to be, but it’s a real surprise to get them out of the kiln the next day!’

The result is an exquisite series of bespoke glass forms that truly represents the talent, craftsmanship and collaborative spirit of Australian design.

Why Design & Creativity Is Important by Mary Featherston

The Design Files are celebrating more than 10 years covering Australian design and creativity, and I have been asked, ‘why is design and creativity crucially important?’

Creativity is the process of bringing ideas/things into being that have not existed before; it may be a child’s sketch or a vastly complex particle accelerator. As Sir Ken Robinson, guru of creativity and education, says, ‘Creativity is at the very heart of society, it is what sets us apart from everything else on Earth’.

Any process of creativity involves wondering, experimenting, and imagining. It also involves the pain of risk taking and failure. But as a long-practising designer, I know that to bring something into being that has not existed before is a source of personal development and great pleasure, especially when it involves collaborating with others.

Where do we find creativity? In 1947, Robin Boyd, one of Australia’s most creative architects, established The Age Small Homes Service, a design solution to the challenge of providing affordable housing at the end of the second World War. For a payment of five pounds anyone visiting the service (in Myer Melbourne) could select from a variety of plans and specifications by local, ground-breaking architects. Many of these projects were built and have recently been exhibited as part of the Robin Boyd centenary celebrations.

A more recent example was the fluorescent pink seesaws on the US-Mexico border created by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San José State University. This was an act of protest, but one that brought children from both sides of the border together to play. It only lasted for 40 minutes before being removed by authorities, but, thanks to communication technology, images rapidly reached across the world and have left an enduring message about harmony and solidarity. For me, these two very different projects exemplify creativity in the service of people and society.

Everyone is creative, from birth, and everyone has the right to be creative all through their lives. How can this be made a reality? How can creativity be nurtured? As a designer and activist specialising in design of learning environments, I have been privileged to spend hundreds of hours with young people of all ages, in situations where they were able to exercise and express their creative capabilities. Children constantly show us, if we allow them, the human capacity for wondering, imagining, experimenting and creating.

For decades, luminary educators and young people themselves, have been calling for radical transformation of school education. They have recently been joined by industry leaders seeking graduates with different skills. Curiosity, creativity, lateral thinking and problem solving are understood to be the keys to developing a more entrepreneurial and productive economy. But mainstream education remains focused on sequential learning, right answers and narrow predictable outcomes that can be readily tested. Creativity is playful, dynamic, unpredictable and messy.

Leading neuroscientists and educators believe there is a complementarity between intellectual capacities and creativity, not opposition. But school education typically separates academic and creative disciplines. This separation is enshrined in the ‘design’ of every element of schooling: curriculum, time management and organisation of the physical environment, separating general purpose classrooms and specialist areas.

There is a rich legacy of progressive education, and some powerful contemporary examples where innovative educators have developed approaches to learning which have, as their starting point, a belief in children’s curiosity and capabilities. Creativity, as Sir Ken says, is at the very heart of what it is to be an educated person. Creativity is at the centre of all disciplines, and all disciplines are interconnected.

Children often ask profound questions; what is beside the world? How do birds fly? How big was the largest dinosaur? These questions arise from their daily lived experience and can be the provocation for creative exploration and discovery in long-term inquiry projects, when teachers work alongside children to seek deeper understanding. As the educators in the schools of Reggio Emilia, in Northern Italy, say, ‘This approach to learning is open to that which has not yet been put into words; a pedagogy that finds joy in the unexpected, that dares to follow projects in motion without knowing where they may lead’. They also say that creativity should not be considered a separate mental activity but a characteristic of our way of thinking, knowing and making choices. This is why they consider the learning process to be a creative process – the ability to construct new connections between thoughts and objects that bring about innovation and change, taking known elements and constructing new connections. Here, learning is an active, creative process, and not simply a transmission of information.

There are schools locally and systems in the USA and Europe which totally integrate creativity and design into every aspect of what they do; Specialist and generalist teachers work closely together to develop connections across disciplines and to teach knowledge and skills in context. Design of the physical environment (indoors and out) is purposefully intended to support a dynamic, democratic approach to learning and teaching, with access to diverse purposefully designed settings, as needed for developing long-term inquiry projects.

The Victorian Department of Education is urgently constructing schools to meet the needs of our rapidly growing population. It is vital these new buildings do not set in concrete obsolete pedagogies but support contemporary creative approaches to learning and teaching to develop young people’s sense of identity, as well as their capacities for original ideas, creativity and action. Educational experiences that link head, hands and heart.