Innovation Talks
MAVlab Innovation Talks is a new event series that will act like innovation acupuncture by showcasing inspirational public sector work and the extraordinary practitioners leading it.
Monthly events will be hosted online, convening a collection of international luminaries with leading local practitioners sharing work from around Victoria and the world.
Talks will focus on themes of community health & wellbeing, climate futures, future gen, connected places, tomorrow’s infrastructure, local leadership and emerging tech and data practices.
MAVlab Innovation Talks: Connected Places with Nathalie de Vries and Jocelyn Chiew
Event Details
- Date: Wednesday, 28 August 2024
- Time: 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Delivery: Online, via Teams
The MAVlab Innovation Talks: Connected Places event will feature a curated conversation between two living legends of public sector design.
In partnership with the Living Cities Forum and the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, MAVLab is excited to bring together visionary architect Nathalie de Vries (the DV from the world-renowned Dutch architecture practice MVRDV) in conversation with Jocelyn Chiew, Director of City Design at the City of Melbourne.
Facilitated by Bonnie Shaw (MAV Chief Innovator in Residence) this conversation will roam through topics like: how good public design can engage community in social spaces, the role of public design and architecture in activating cities and citizens, and how provocative design can empower greater participation in the public realm.
Join us for a lively conversation on Wednesday 28 August.
Speaker: Nathalie de Vries, Co-Founder, MVRDV
A visionary architect, urbanist and co-founder of Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, known for designing innovative, unexpected, and joyful mixed-use buildings that transform urban spaces.
Nathalie de Vries is co-founder of the global practice MVRDV, established in 1993 in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and now operating from five offices worldwide. As a principal architect and urbanist, she has played an important role in establishing the research-by-design methodology of the firm, resulting in many award-winning buildings, masterplans, and research projects worldwide.
Her focus on the public aspects of architecture, as well design processes driven foremost by societal relevance including the usage of data, resulted in in the past in part-time consultancy functions like Dutch Chief Railroad Architect and City Architect of Groningen. She investigates in her work what she calls ‘the urgent need for more multiplicity in design’, the need to create innovative architecture that is more productive and transformative to be future proof.
Committed to the education of future generations of architects, she is currently full Professor of Architectural Design and Public Building at Delft University of Technology. She also regularly lectures worldwide and takes part in international competition juries.
Speaker: Jocelyn Chiew, Director City Design, City of Melbourne
A multi-award winning Architect, Landscape Architect and Urban Designer, Director of City Design at the City of Melbourne, known for her unwavering commitment to high quality public sector design.
Jocelyn Chiew has led multidisciplinary design teams in consultancy, university and local government sectors, to deliver enduring public spaces and buildings for diverse communities. She is passionate about inclusive and participatory design that contributes to safe, sustainable and place specific architectures.
Jocelyn is the Director City Design at the City of Melbourne, where she leads the Design Excellence Program and City Design Studio. She is Deputy Chair of the Melbourne Design Review Panel, convenor of the Design Excellence Advisory Committee and oversees The Excellent City Series – an annual program of design talks and workshops. The studio works on urban design strategies, public works, and design reviews for council, state and private developments.
Jocelyn’s current and past industry appointments include member Gender Equity Victoria Put Her Name on It Reference Group, member Victorian Design Review Panel, Fellow Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA), former State and National Councillor Australian Institute of Architects, founding Chair AILA Gender Equity Working Group and member Association of University Architects.
Jocelyn’s projects have won multiple state, national and international awards for design. Jocelyn is committed to nurturing the next generation of designers, has led multiple design studios at a Masters level, and continues to contribute as a sessional lecturer and design critic at Melbourne School of Design, RMIT University and Monash University.
Facilitator: Bonnie Shaw, Chief Innovator in Residence, MAV
A renowned leader in public sector innovation, data informed design and adaptive leadership, known for leading wildly collaborative practices, celebratory engagement and high impact, design led interventions into complex challenges.
Bonnie is the Chief Innovator in Residence at the Municipal Association of Victoria. In this role, Bonnie leads MAVlab - building an innovation practice and collaborative ways of working at scale with the intent to support the network of 79 local governments in Victoria with responses to critical and increasingly complex social, environmental, economic, technological and leadership challenges.
Bonnie trained as a landscape architect and urban designer but was corrupted early in her career by diversions into game design and emerging technologies. More recently, Bonnie was the Practice Lead for Australia’s first (and multi-award winning) smart cities team at the City of Melbourne. She co-founded a successful data analytics startup and has worked with organisations as varied as The Foundation for Young Australians, NASA, the (Obama) Whitehouse, Capital One Labs, AECOM, NIKE global, the World Bank, and Hilton Hotels.
Bonnie is passionate about life-long learning and has held adjunct professor roles at Georgetown University (Washington DC) and Melbourne Business School (Melbourne VIC). She is a regular collaborator with the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) and the School of Cybernetics at ANU. She is a member of the RSA and her passion to engage more diverse practitioners in the design and application of advanced technology and automation has seen her recognised as a 2021 finalist in the prestigious Australian and New Zealand Women in AI Awards and as an Ai Visionary in the inaugural 2023 global Relativity Awards.
Bonnie is the Creative Director of SHTF SHFT (https://www.shtfshft.com/) where she is leads research and design for a "survival guide for compounding crisis" to enable individuals and organisations to thrive in challenging times.