The Brief
We were required to curate and design an exhibition with the theme, The Joy of Motoring. The exhibition would be attended by the members of Automotive Historians Australia, who held a conference hosted by the RMIT School of Design sometime in October 2019. We were given a timeline of 12 weeks to plan, execute, and deinstall the elements and prosthetics that make up the exhibition.
For the first three weeks of the project, we were required to pitch an exhibition concept to RMIT Design Archive, who were our venue partner for the event. My teammates and I came up with the selected concept, and was used in moving forward with the completion of the project. The concept was centred on the joy and thrill of discovery that has always been present in major figures of the Australian automotive industry.
Moving forward from the conceptual stage, we proceeded to plan on the design decisions we would take to turn these historical contexts into physical experiences within a contemporary space. One of these design decisions were to incorporate wooden materials as part of the exhibition prosthetics. This was a reference to how earlier Australian automotive designers relied on wood to form prototype car models, but we also saw it as an opportunity to utilise materials that would live beyond the exhibition.
One example of this would be using laser-cut plywood to form signages in the exhibition, to which we were able to return the boards back to the campus workshop to be repurposed in other forms in the future. This design decision took a process where we needed to understand the materials suitability and production steps from start to finish, and was definitely eye-opening in my understanding of a designer’s role and sensibilities as a decision-maker assigned to a project.
Co-designed with
Team members on Branding and Signage Team,
Thy Há, Belinda, Sarvani Nadiminti, An-ni Liu
Alongside 32 other student designers, across 7 teams in Curating & Exhibiting for Communication Design, July 2019 Semester