Overview
Sydney Design descends on this city annually to wrap it in a web of style, sweet-talking much of its otherwise design-agnostic population into appreciating the form, fit and function of the useful stuff in their lives. This year, it's focused around the theme of lace, including a central Powerhouse exhibition and events with thread-centric themes, like a bicycle culture tour that makes a crochet workshop pit stop.
The Powerhouse will host the annual Young Blood: Designers Market and design awards, and visitors there are invited to add to Shane Waltener's giant lace sculpture, Knitted and Looped. Hamish Ta-mé will put together a huge paste-up on the side of a Surry Hills warehouse, weaving and reweaving the same portraits night after night each evening for Reworking the Paste-Up, while up the hill in Kippax Street, you can check out choice rooftop, design-themed movies at the Design Film Screening. In Chippendale, Allen Jack+Cottier have installed a cafe in their headquarters, wrapping it with an exhibition on the neighbourhood's slow march from brewing icon to caffeine addict.
Meanwhile, COFA is running the COFA Design Festival as a Sydney Design mini-festival-within-a-festival. COFA's contribution includes the annual campus-wide, one-day forum Live Futures 2020, a series of design and sustainability-themed talks and two new exhibitions by COFA staff and students. COFA isn't the only artistic institution to huddle under the festival umbrella either, with innumerable shows featuring Bauhaus, the typewriter, sand, hand-made bikes and Italian seating.