Creative Vision

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Envisaging a revival for arts and culture is exciting. The launch of the National Cultural Policy marks a new beginning. The possibility of funding to return support for small to medium organisations like Australian Design Centre is encouraging. The focus on the arts and creative industries as real jobs, acknowledging the huge contribution made to the overall economy, is a great start as is the emphasis on reconciliation to empower First Nations’ creative expression. 

Australian Design Centre looks forward to the 2025-28 period as a new era in which craft and design are front and centre as key drivers of cultural and economic growth. A return to making and manufacture in Australia coupled with consumer preference and priority to buy Australian designed consumer goods, environmentally responsible and locally made, is what will be needed for a sustainable future. 

We will play our role as a conduit to promote the makers, the designers and the creative thinkers who will drive this much needed revival. We will tell the stories of creative brilliance, connect the maker with the consumer, show people how they too can derive benefits from making for health and wellbeing and to enable them to make a difference for the planet. 

We will do this through platforms – such as exhibitions, competitions, workshops, market development and digital – to drive conversations and creative connections sparking new ideas and better ways to problem solve through design process.  We will put the creative practitioners centre stage to gather the data, the investment and the support they need to turn their ideas into real solutions. It will be about creating new objects with new materials; solving problems of waste and scarcity; and developing new ways to live creatively. 

New programs such as the $45,000 MAKE Award: Biennial prize for innovation in craft and design, creation of new programming that will flow from the implementation of our new Strategic Framework: First Nations Engagement, new collaborations with sector and cross-sector partners and philanthropic partnerships building on the excellent work of recent years will strengthen Australian Design Centre’s impact as we enter our seventh decade in 2025.

Investment in Australian Design Centre will help to restore our capacity to achieve what Australia needs for a creative future. This investment will give a much-needed place for the stories of craft and design to be told; whether that be by facilitating new ways of making, a revival of old crafts, or a new appreciation that design is as valid as an art form as it is a system. In all this, the community is at the centre, with ADC’s programming supporting artists to achieve the joy and tangible benefits that craft and design offer for a fulfilling career and a catalyst for the broader community to co-create experiences that enrich their lives.

Below is Australian Design Centre's 2023 Creative Program and Strategic Framework: First Nations Engagement.

Creative Program 2023
Strategic Framework: First Nations Engagement 2023–2027

Top image: FUSE Installation View 2022. Photo: Rhiannon Hopley