DESIGN FRINGE 2024
Award winners

Best bespoke design
Eugenie Kawabata

Botanica Exotica: Unknown Civilisations #2

Botanica Exotica: Unknown Civilisations #2 draws inspiration from the botanical world, particularly the interplay between the exotic and native plant life that inhabit our urban parks and gardens. Through a nuanced exploration of these divergent narratives, the vessel brings a talking piece to the table, inspiring connection, understanding and conversation.

Eugenie Kawabata is an independent, Melbourne based designer, artist and object maker. Her creative practice lies at the intersection of art and design and in the innovation of crafting objects with an emphasis on materiality and sustainability. Her intention is to draw attention to consumption, object disposability and the value of objects. Over the past five years, her focus has been on utilising textile waste, giving rise to an ever-evolving collection of vessels, the 'Second Life' series. Kawabata has had a studio at the Abbotsford Convent since 2014 and has participated in and curated exhibitions as part of Melbourne Design Week since 2017. In 2020, the National Gallery of Victoria acquired a work from the 'Second Life' series. 'Botanica Exotica' was first showcased at Melbourne Design Fair in 2023, before a larger exhibition, 'Botanica Exotica: Unknown Civilisations' at the Jam Factory, in Adelaide, South Australia,
May-July 2024.

Highly Commended Bespoke Design 

Marta Figueiredo, Chronicles of Resilience

Best experimental design
Evie Rosa

The Comforter

The Comforter explores the intimacy associated with beds and the interactions that unfold beneath the covers. Unlike the more public dialogues of spaces like the dining room table, the conversations that happen in bed are dreamlike, hushed, and softer. By repurposing an existing quilt cover, 'The Comforter' aims to personify our relationship with our beds, offering a deep engagement with the material and emotional layers that shape our experiences of comfort and vulnerability. Evie Rosa is an emerging creative practitioner who adopts an interdisciplinary approach to textile design and production. She aims to expand the way fashion and design processes can foster more responsive practitioners capable of responding to the challenges in production and consumption systems in contemporary society. Her work is intrinsically reflexive through its disruption of internality and externality, forcing analysis of the alterity of human experience in relation to non-human factors like a bed.

Highly Commended Experimental Design

Edie Kurzer, The Baubles are coming for dinner – what’s for bricolage?

best in furniture
Britt Salt

Turning the Grid (I and II)

Turning the Grid I & II occupy a space between furniture and sculpture. Made from powder coated stainless steel, their height is that of a standard bench seat with room for two people to sit. But their curved base means they easily tip and rock from side to side when touched. The instability of these objects signals a turning or divergence from a controlled environment. When two people move to sit down on a form together, they must do so in sync, finding balance in space and a reciprocal support from each other’s body.

Britt Salt works across sculpture, textiles, drawing, installation and public art. Her works are complex in their construction and minimal in aesthetic, exploring site-specific and imagined architectures. Britt uses intuitive geometry and hand-crafted methodical processes to trace the intricacies of order in public and private space. Seeking to unearth latent possibilities within ordered constraints, and control within disorder. Britt Salt grew up on Yamatji Country in Geraldton, WA and is now based in Naarm/Melbourne. She has exhibited at CRAFT; Town Hall Gallery; Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery; and PICA. She has received prestigious awards such as the Art & Australia Emerging Artist Award, and Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship. The artist has undertaken residencies at the Australian Tapestry Workshop; Youkobo, Japan; and Red Gate Gallery, Beijing. She has created major public artworks for Melbourne International Airport, Tsinghua University Beijing, and Fender Katsalidis Architects. Salt holds a Masters of Contemporary Art from VCA. Her work is held in collections including Wangaratta Art Gallery; University of Melbourne; Justin Art House Museum; and Artbank.

Highly Commended Furniture Design

Carl Broesen, Rope Lounger

Best lighting design
Richard Greenacre

Crux (Quintet & Trio)

Crux is a table lamp crafted to inspire interaction and play. Cast from fine Australian porcelain, the lamp invites users to engage with its form through stacking interlocking modules, enabling the creation of unique colour combinations and shapes. Each section can be rotated to direct the orientation of light and change the overall form of the lamp. Crux encourages not only individual creativity but also collective exploration, fostering togetherness as users collaborate in configuring the lamp to suit their shared space. Crux is not just a source of light; it’s a catalyst for conversation, curiosity, and connection. The playful form invites you to engage with it, to touch, twist, and explore, making the act of turning on a lamp a delightful experience in itself.

Richard Greenacre is a Naarm/Melbourne based industrial designer whose work encompasses furniture, lighting and object design. His design approach is grounded in material experimentation and research, and places emphasis on hands-on experience and the act of designing through making. Over the last decade Greenacre has been increasingly focused on exploring the material possibilities of clay, creating work that dwells in the liminal space between Industrial Design and Craft.

Highly Commended Lighting Design

Kaspian Kan, Six Sticks

best object design
Makushla Harper

Sobremesa Cup Set

The Sobremesa Cup Set is named after the Spanish word for languid afternoons following lunchtime, in the golden summer sun, and was designed to encourage new movement patterns and ways of interaction. The polished stainless steel surfaces glint and gleam in the long afternoon light, reflecting sparkles in eyes from easy laughter. The work has been designed for outdoor dining; each cup hooks onto a pack or branch, rather than sitting on a table, therefore the contents must be consumed before setting the cup down. The Sobremesa Cup Set is made for subdued soirees on a patio, through to multi-day treks through the mountains. The user can cradle the Sobremesa cup in two hands, with a warm coffee or cocoa, elegantly hold wine in a single hand, stand the cup upright by pushing the handle into soil or sand, and roll the cup along the ground.

Makushla Harper is an emerging Industrial Designer from Tasmania, now based in Melbourne. Her design methodology centres around texture and tactile experience, leaning heavily on physical prototyping to find new ways of working with existing materials. She finds inspiration in the outdoors as an avid hiker, boulderer and adventurer. She is a graduate of RMIT Industrial Design, and currently works as a lighting designer and sessional lecturer.

Highly Commended Object Design

Bridget Saville, Of Which We Are Made
Rebecca George, Material Memory

ADA Design Futures Award
Carl Broesen

Loom Lounge

Carl Broesen’s works re-imagine functional furniture as a catalyst for connection and shared experiences, in line with the theme "We have shared bread and salt." The Loom Lounge invites people to gather and sit together, its woven structure symbolizing the coming together of diverse materials—just as shared meals bring people closer. This piece is designed to transform everyday moments into opportunities for deeper connection, reflecting the essence of shared bread and salt in building community.

Carl Broesen is a furniture, lighting, and object designer-maker based in Melbourne (Naarm). He enjoys being in the workshop crafting new and interesting objects that reflect the value of sustainability with poetic and functional merit. He believes design plays a pivotal role in shaping the world we live in, and with it a responsibility for designers to solve problems that ultimately benefit the planet and everything in it. Whilst studying a Bachelor of Design in product design, Broesen dived into the design industry working as a concept designer and fabricator working with acclaimed designers, most notably Adam Goodrum and Patryk Koca. Since graduating, he has worked across the design field from architectural model making through to furniture prototyping and design resolution. Currently working in the design & production development team at Tait outdoor furniture, he is heavily involved in all stages of the design process from concept to product delivery and ongoing development. Alongside this, he continues to develop his own products through his practice Carl Broesen Studio.