By-Product: Melbourne Design Week 2021
Mycelium Studios was honoured to host ground breaking open source based exhibition By-Product for Melbourne Design Week 2021, produced and curated by Rachel Kelly and Ulla-Britta Westergren, and brought to you by the NGV.
A group exhibition including works from some of Australia’s leading designers and artists, By-Product explores how circular economy and open-source knowledge sharing can help reduce waste in design.
For more information and to view the open source content, please visit the exhibition website:
By-Product Manifesto:
We are designers, producers, creators, consumers, buyers, sellers, world citizens, and a local community. We don’t want our products to destroy our planet, we want to be part of nature, part of the continuous cycle of abundance.
When we look to the natural world, we see systems working together in symbiotic harmony. Nature produces abundance without unusable waste.
How might an abundance mentality solve design’s waste problem?
When we look at the waste problem with an abundance mindset, it is clear that waste is not a problem, it is not the end. Waste is a raw material – the beginning of the next life cycle, an opportunity for new life, ideas and growth.
How might we foster an abundance mindset during a global pandemic and a time of mass economic uncertainty?
By-Product seeks to explore how an abundance mindset might help us solve design’ waste problem by inviting leading Melbourne designers to re-use the by-products identified in their design practise as a way to minimise their impact and explore new economic opportunities.
How might we build resilience in the design community by actively contributing our ideas and knowledge for free?
A resilient community is built on trusting relationships that are mutually beneficial. To build community resilience we must work together to break down the physical and digital silos we find ourselves operating in. The first step we can all manage is to reach out and make connections with our community and actively participate in knowledge sharing – a concept practiced for millennia by indigenous communities. The main barrier to this sort of sharing is a scarcity mindset – we fear our knowledge is limited and that others will use our ideas to make gains at our expense. When we make a conscious shift to an abundance mindset, shared knowledge becomes a communal tool. And the field of emergence that it creates becomes an abundant resource that helps the community and its people grow.
How might applying open-source principles of transparency, collaboration, inclusive meritocracy and community accelerate a shift towards a circular economy where waste is reimagined, ideas shared and design resilience within the community a by-product of such an experiment?
By-Product is taking this step forward by asking contributors to share process videos, materials lists and documentation with the open-source community to inspire others to adopt an abundance mindset and see the waste around us as a resource – as an opportunity.
Exhibition photography by Organic Photo.
