Brisbane: it’s a city that is flourishing with new infrastructure and exciting commercial and residential architecture and developments. It is also home to a close, talented community of professional creatives. There’s just one thing! From all reports, the city would welcome a few more awesome design events to bring the local community together and feed into the design buzz that is thrumming through the city.

Enter Brisbane Designscape. Now in its second iteration (following its launch in 2022), this one-day event is taking place in Brisbane on 4 November, at 108 Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley.

Register to attend the event here.

“Brisbane Designscape aims to provide professional development and networking opportunities for the design community in Queensland,” says Jason Mark of Offiscape – Eduscape, who led the development of the first Designscape in 2022.

In 2023 the event is returning in a new format, as a local, one-day event, themed ‘reconnect’. The program includes workshops, speaker presentation sessions, and the Reconnect 23 Afterparty hosted by Luxxbox, a networking event for the Brisbane design community. Add to this, Designscape’s ‘house band’ for the day, Black Pudding, and the vibe is set to go off.

This year’s Designscape is themed ‘reconnect’ and has been curated by Paul Fairweather, a former architect-turned-speaker and writer, and co-founder of TEDxBrisbane. For the speaker sessions Fairweather has recruited 15+ speakers who are social justice activists, artists, storytellers, architects, designers and neuroscientists, inviting them to share presentations that speak to topics of ‘connection’, ‘interconnection’ and ‘reconnection’.

A few Designscape program highlights are as follows.

1. Speaker – Rachel Barnard on Connecting with justice

Rachel is a coach, entrepreneur, and artist. She created the proprietary Map process that allows creative entrepreneurs to get unstuck and achieve their wildest dreams.

Rachel has been Mapping for over two decades. Her art+coaching model was advanced during the decade she founded Young New Yorkers (YNY), the first arts-based Alternative to Incarceration program in NYC. She assisted over 1,400 young people to exit the criminal legal system via creative programming.

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2. Speaker – Gavin Blake on Connection with scribing

Gavin has been drawing conversations, systems, and stories for over 20 years. His work has been seen at over 70 TEDx events around Australia and abroad. Visual scribing inspires and entertains audiences and leaves them with useful visuals that enable them to share and remember the event content at a glance more effectively than video or text transcripts. 

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3. Speaker – Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole is recognised as an expert in strategy and enhancing performance for emerging medium sized business. She has facilitated strategic growth for over 100 businesses and chaired the advisory boards of eight private companies from start-up to $500 million in turnover.

She has founded two companies, sold two and been an investor in an e-commerce business, a catering company and supports the operations of the family car rental business with her husband Peter Clark founder of Crazy Clarks Discount stores.

She is the co-founder of Growth Education Institute (groei) an innovative learning company nurturing the development of future thinking skills through peer and project-based learning.

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4. Urban Sketchers workshop

The purpose of this group is to create a community of sketchers who come together to participate in the practice of on-location drawing. Through our sketches we capture a view into the places that we directly observe and share with others the scenes that we witness.

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5. First Nations weaving workshop organised by Blaklash

Experience and participate in traditional First Nations practices. Hosted by Sonja Carmichael, Kim Ah Sam, Leecee Carmichael and Ivy Minniecon.

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6. The Reconnect 23 Afterparty hosted by Luxxbox

Wrap up the day at the Reconnect 23 Afterparty hosted by Luxxbox. You’ll have the chance to connect with local designers, global brands, and speakers from the day while enjoying live entertainment, delicious food and drinks.

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Brisbane Designscape takes place 4 November 2023, at 108 Wickam Terrace, Fortitude Valley. Workshops start at 9am, speaker sessions start at 11am, and will conclude at 5pm, with the afterparty to follow.

Register and purchase your tickets here. Explore the full program here.

Brisbane Designscape
brisbanedesignscape.com.au

We think you might like this article wrapping up last year’s Brisbane Designscape.