Melbourne Design Week | LCI Re-Connected

For Melbourne Design Week 2021, LCI Melbourne will be hosting six experimental design laboratories, that investigate how creativity can foster meaningful connections. Join us on Saturday 27 March at 11.30am to explore, collaborate and share your creativity and skills!

Come along to our Salvage Design Swap Meet to collect materials, connect with creatives and replenish your art and design supplies. You will then have the opportunity to select three of the six immersive laboratories to attend. Don’t forget to explore the creative attractions on offer across our Collingwood campus throughout the day!

Register your attendance for the event using the form above, there's more details and sneak peaks to come. Learn more about each of the experimental design laboratories below!


Ways to Wear Workshop | Rebecca Gully 

Ways to Wear is an experimental design and performance workshop, giving pre-loved clothes and scrap fabrics a new life to inspire original garments. Working in teams, create interesting shapes and forms by cutting, layering and transferring to different parts of the body; inside out, upside down, twisted, layered or torn!

This workshop is all about salvage, re-use, innovation, collaboration and inspiration! It is not to be missed.

Scavenge & Salvage Workshop | Amy Graham & Michelle Mantsio  

Experiment with the materiality of scavenged things. This workshop will teach you to find new ways of viewing the natural beauty of objects otherwise unnoticed. Using plastics, old clothes, fabric scraps, packaging and any other scavenged materials, we find new purpose for what would normally be thrown away.

Anything considered unwanted can be woven and threaded into something new. It is an intuitive process and the materials used will help guide the end result. We all have relationships with things and the places they came from, this emotional connection is what we hope to evoke in the end result.

Tech Petz Workshop | Donna O’Neill & Sam Bryant 

Discover creative uses for those forgotten and discarded objects that are destined for hard rubbish. Find new uses for computers, printers, clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, in fact, anything that can be pulled apart.

Construct a Tech Pet of your own design and be proud that your creativity has helped reduce landfill. All materials are provided.

Grow to Give Workshop | Magda Czapiewska & Gee Ward 

Whether you are a master propagator or just want to add some greenery to your space, this workshop is for you! Share plant clippings, create living art and grow to give in this multi-sensory workshop! Participants will explore the endless possibilities of recycled paper to make and decorate a biodegradable seedling pot to house plant clippings from LCI Melbourne’s green wall.

Bio Design Workshop | Michael Peck & Todd Heggie

In this workshop, LCI Melbourne’s Creative Director, Michael Peck and Fashion Academic, Todd Heggie, will teach you how to make bio leather from kombucha scoby!

Get experimental and learn to make a sustainable and flexible biomaterial, made from the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Craft your ‘leather’ into a masterpiece during the workshop or save it for later to create clothing, accessories and other creative objects!

Creative Constructed Type Workshop | Barry Spencer 

Adapt, modify and reinterpret your expectations and ideas of letter shapes! In this practical workshop, participants will construct letterforms using a range of scavenged and salvaged materials. Experiment with wood and cardboard to overcome a series of basic challenges, set to test your perception and understanding of letterform. 

Stray from the ordinary and play with moving or fixed elements to create dynamic letterforms!


Melbourne Design Week is Australia's largest annual international design event, running from 26 March to 05 April 2021. Across eleven days there will be over 300 exhibitions, talks, films, tours and workshops, including the first ever program in Gippsland, Eastern Victoria.

Melbourne Design Week 2021 is curated around the central provocation, ‘Design the world you want’, questioning how the design community can work together to create a better, healthier future for the planet and its inhabitants.

You can view the full program at designweek.melbourne.