Victorian Engineering Industry Week

Events are running over the week from 21 September to 25 September. Visit the website to check out what's on a register to attend. A lot of networking opportunities. Make the most of it, this is our mid-semester break!

Bluestone Lounge Room – Designing the streets of Melbourne

There's another small exhibition at City Gallery (110 Swanston St) called Bluestone Lounge Room - Designing the streets of Melbourne. It shows some of the design workings of urban furniture design. Street lights, seats, etc. and a bit of history. Also features some nice street photography. Probably not worth going into the city just for this, but if you are nearby (perhaps visiting the NGV) then its worth dropping in for a quick browse if you are interested in the urban environment.

What's on at NGV

I dropped into the NGV @ Fed Square today, there is an exhibition called "Draw the Line: the Architecture of LAB". LAB is an architecture studio who won the 1997 competition to design what is now the Federation Square precinct. The exhibition shows a lot of conceptual sketching and mockup models made during the design process, and it makes you appreciate the design of the buildings much more when you see it. There are also a number of drawings and models of other projects the studio has worked on around the world, and most impressively there are a number of ~1:100 scale polystyrene models of the buildings at the back of the gallery. The exhibition is held on Level 3, in Galleries 15 and 16 - and best of all, it's free! The exhibit will be open until September 13.

On Level 2, in Gallery 12, there is also a small exhibition of the 2009 Cicely and Colin Rigg Contemporary Design Award. There are a small number of very cool seating pieces designed in the last couple of years. This exhibition is open until August 30, and is also free.

Peter Belanger - Creating a Macworld magazine cover

Here's a very cool timelapse of the process of creating a magazine cover. From start to finish :)

Cover creation from Peter Belanger on Vimeo.

Better Place - Australia

Today in Professional Attributes, we watched a recording of Shai Agassi speaking at a TED conference back in February 2009 about electric vehicles. A very bold plan indeed, and it will be interesting to see how they will roll out an entire electric freeway to cover the large distances between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Perhaps this will not be necessary if we had a high speed train link between them, with the ability to freely hire EVs at the destination.

It was just recently announced that Better Place will begin rolling out an EV network in Canberra by 2011. It will be a fantastic place to these showcase types of vehicles in Australia, and I am already looking for ways to get involved in this project in the future.

In the beginning..

As part of Product Design 6 - Professional Attributes we are to keep a blog to put our voice out there to encourage thinking and exploration of design. I will most likely be using this space to comment on interesting projects in the design world and to display my work and ideas for scrutiny.