Ideas that could change your life - Charlwood Design's concept for a better future for Melbourne

Charlwood Design's Director, Paul Charlwood was recently featured in an article in The Age Melbourne Magazine showcasing innovative design research for the future of Melbourne.

What is it? Commonwealth Avenue - a conceptual design for Kings Way that would create a shared transport route for trams, cars, bikes and pedestrians and incorporate water and solar energy collection.
Who's doing it? Charlwood Design - who created the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games Queen's baton - came up with the concept as an internal exercise to try and add beauty and function to a major traffic feeder into the city. The team wanted to bring different modes of transport - bicycles, cars, trams and pedestrians - together in a sustainable way. "It's a reflection of Dandenong Road and the avenue down there," says Paul Charlwood. "I always loved the old overhead tram poles that are Victorian structures in their own right." The joint carriageway would be better than Copenhagen-style lanes "that are an afterthought", he says. "Kings Way is crying out for something to be done and this could be a great example - making a feature out of the overhead tram poles so they are more elegant and then the water and solar collection are the sustainability side. They could feed down to street plantings or parks nearby."
Could it work? With government backing, Charlwood believes construction could start within a couple of years. "It's already starting to look more logical and contemporary. As we start to swing out of the GFC," he says, "sustainability issues will come back onto the agenda."

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/ideas-that-could-change-your-life-20130312-2fxo6.html#ixzz2ODktjs7w

More on the project: http://charlwood.com.au/sustainability/commonwealth-ave-concept.aspx

Sydney Design Award winners

The Charlwood Design team was thrilled to win a 2012 Sydney Design award for the best product design - business and technology category for the stage management desks designed for the Sydney Opera House.

The project also recently won a Melbourne design award.

2012 Melbourne Design Award Winners

The Charlwood Design team was thrilled to win a 2012 Melbourne Design award for the best product design - business and technology category for our design of the Sydney Opera House's new stage management desks.

The stage management desk controls everything to do with the performance at the venues in the Sydney Opera House in both the front and back of house. The six existing units were well past their use by date and needed to be replaced with a state of the art design to serve for the next 20 years.

This is the second Melbourne design award Charlwood has won, having previously been awarded best consumer product for the catch-all broom design for Oates in 2010.

Charlwood Design's Director discusses the Victorian Governments New Design Strategy in the Age

Charlwood Design's director, Paul Charlwood was recently interviewed in the Age regarding his opinion on the new design strategy launched by the Government.

Besides being the director of one of Australia's leading design consultancy, Paul is also a councillor and government liaison of the Design Institute of Australia.

A short excerpt of the article:
''We need someone in the 'C' suite - whether the chief executive or chief financial officer - as opposed to someone behind the engineering team going, 'I understand design, I've got a black shirt','' he says
It's those decision makers who need to adopt design, Charlwood says.

Additionally, encouraging international companies to establish design offices in Victoria and sending our designers to overseas expos are the measures Charlwood looks to.

''It's not a massive move on [from the previous government strategy],'' he says.
''The proof will be in if they can actually engage business and offshore.

''In Australia, design answers to the engineering manager, so if these programs can assist in getting businesses to incorporate design rather than just being a styling thing at the end, that will be positive.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/premier-finally-raises-the-curtain-on-his-grand-design-20120913-25usx.html#ixzz26lydnko2

Insight from Richard Seymour - Seymour Powell

Some of Charlwood Design's team had the pleasure of meeting Richard Seymour, founder of leading UK industrial design consultancy Seymour Powell a few years ago when he spoke at the AGIdeas conference.

He was recently asked on what he thinks the big game-changers will be in industrial design in the next two to five years. His thoughts were really insightful:

“There’s a storm coming. The design world as we know it is separating into the Polymaths and the Guilds. The Polymaths are the broad-bandwidth thinkers who can see across cultural and technical boundaries to find meaning in new future combinations…and the Guilds, the specialist capabilities that can facilitate those ideas once they have been envisioned.
The designer as we know it is already an endangered species. What is a service and what is a product in the 21st Century is up for grabs. Where does the Product end and the Metaproduct begin? How many ‘services’ as we know them today are going to have to migrate to ‘this side of the glass’ and articulate themselves through physical metaphors of their virtual self? Is NEST an object, a service or part of a synthetic-aperture radar gathering big data for the highest bidder? I guess it depends who you are and what your agenda is.
The next five years may witness the most important shift in consumption patterns we’ve seen for centuries. Buckle-up Dorothy, you’re going to have to be on your toes. And if you’re going to continue to call yourself a designer, better work out what that means….”