It’s approaching the time of year when Hamer Hall (The Arts Centre, Melbourne) rolls out the red carpet to welcome some of the world’s best and brightest design stars to its stage for the annual agIdeas International Design Week, 26-29 April 2010. This year, the 20th anniversary of agIdeas, is set to be a massive event with 40 international and national leaders from across the many fields of design.
Run by the Design Foundation, agIdeas started life in 1991 as a humble design gathering, thanks to its visionary founder Ken Cato of Cato Partners, one of the Australia’s premier Design and branding companies. Over the past 20 years agIdeas has continued to grow in size and has bought to the stage over 440 members of the world’s most elite design talent including David Carson, Stefan Sagmeister, Richard Seymour, April Greiman, Erik Spiekermann, Sass and Bide, Luca Missoni and creatives from Pixar, Dream Works, and IDEO.
This achievement, bringing high caliber designers and a drawing huge audience (every year an ever growing audience makes the pilgrimage to agIdeas, a grand total of 43,000+ since 1991), is no small feat as agIdeas is run by a small team of approximately three staff and a cadre of enthusiastic volunteers drawn from the ranks of Australian design schools.
Dan Formosa - Smart Design
In 2009 an audience over two thousand in number (the tickets sold out two weeks prior to the event) descended on Hamer Hall to hear many amazing designers talk about and reflect on their work, motivation and technique. This year’s agIdeas Conference will be no different as the phenomenal line up includes Alex Alvarez (The Gnomon Workshop), Dan Formosa (Smart Design), Dean Poole, Andreas Uebele, Agnete Enga, Dean Gaylor, Richard Ferlazzo (Holden), Alex Ritchie, and many more.
As well as the main three day conference there are also several other fantastic events on during agIdeas International Design Week. agIdeas advantage, is a business breakfast featuring top designers presenting case studies about how design can make a difference to business performance. Full-day workshops with several of the internationally acclaimed designers speaking at the conference will also be held, allowing participants to learn from some of the best in the design world.
Alex Alvarez - The Gnomon Workshop
Students and new graduates will be able to gain insights into the ways local design studios approach their work through the studio access program and through the NewStar Award they will also have opportunities to have their work exhibited at Melbourne Museum and win international travelling scholarships.
This years extravaganza of design talent is an event not to be missed, so be quick (really really quick) and grab your tickets before its too late (as of 18th of March a half of all the tickets have been sold and the tickets do sell out several weeks in advance).
On a side note I would also like to announce that this year Design Droplets is an agIdeas media partner, which is pretty exciting as it is our first major media partnership. See you at agIdeas 2010.
agne teenga
