The Design Lab aims to foster design as a means of knowledge production in its own right…design is a study of the world the way it could be through the creation and interrogation of the "designed" world.

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If we were assigned a piece of the cityscape, how would we interrogate and create a space for ourselves? We might ask: who was here before me, what did it look like, how did it sound, how did people communicate, what did they do for fun? We might ponder: now that I’m here, what should it look like, how should it sound, how do we organise communications, how should we present ourselves? With multiplicitous screens, cacophonous sounds, increasingly mobile technologies, and deeply personal narratives assailing us constantly, how can we make sense of our surrounds in a creative way?

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New Media Curation and the staff at the Design Lab Sydney have answered the call for content at the Rocks PopUp spaces for their annual End of Year Exhibition. This call stands for a need to re-enliven, rework and rejuvenate historical spaces with contemporary artwork. At this time, The Rocks sits adjacent to one of the most famous harbours in the world and is managed by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. It is a lively commercial, tourist, and artistic destination for visitors to and residents of Australia. It has been able to maintain this reputation based on an ever-evolving sense of community, of multiple identities clustered around change, growth and renewal.



Now that we have carved out a space for ourselves in the Sydney-scape, we will utilise contrast to contextualise the concept of community, and articulate that idea through the metaphor of distributed nodes and networks. Our tools utilise these frameworks, our physical site mirrors this idea in that it offers one central space with the opportunity to infiltrate or infringe on other spaces.



We will exhibit some of the designs of the studio masters in the central space, with the works of the students distributed throughout The Rocks PopUp sites. This layered metaphor mirrors the history of The Rocks itself and will be communicated through a series of interactive works for the public to engage with and enjoy.