Curating for future audiences

As part of the Melbourne Design Week (2020), yesterday I attended the Masterclass #1: Curating for future audiences and challenging established conventions and what a fabulous day it was.

First up, there was a panel discussion with Helen Whitehead; Nick Garrett, Katya Wachtel and Romina Calabro who all spoke broadly around adapting your business need’s to the ever-evolving audiences. They highlighted that today we are living in an ‘attention economy’ where people feel they are time poor. So, what’s the secret to retaining and building your customers? Each speaker echoed it’s really about understanding who your customers are, knowing what they want and how you can building on that relationship making it stronger. One key part of the talk addressed that you shouldn’t always rely on the research. If you rely on what the research says then sometimes this limits innovation. Sometimes it’s Important to trust your instinct.

And talking about trusting your instinct… Marita Burke from MECCA was up next who told us about how she proceeded with launching the very first makeup festival – MECCALAND. She spoke about how the business thought it was a silly idea but she trusted her instinct and it was a success. Tickets sold out almost instantly with the second festival to take place in the coming weeks. Two key takeaways from her talk were:

You need to remove all friction
Behaviour drives transaction

Up next, there was a very inspirational talk by Daan Roosegaarde. I can’t give his work full credit by a few words – so instead check out his projects for yourself here – they are incredible. One key takeaway was his advice to look at what is already there and use poetry to fix the problem with green energy – how beautiful right?

My last highlight was Refik Anadol. He spoke on his fabulous work by using space with data. Light is the visual and data is the substance, all augmented together. He had the question ‘what does memory feel like? And do buildings have memories?’ Using data to tell the story/memory of the building, he created an algorithm based on pictures taken of the building, both inside and out. He used light to project the feelings and emotions captured from the pictures to tell the emotional story of the building.

There were some other amazing talks do deserve to be mentioned but short on time. I look forward to checking out the schedule next year and hope they bring some more inspiriting designers, curators, and business owners.