Building creative communities & industries in Dandenong
Creative Industries Space Co-design
Melbourne’s most culturally diverse municipality - the City of Greater Dandenong (CGD) - has a growing population and an economy transitioning away from manufacturing to new industries. To help boost the region’s creative economy, CGD is converting one of its buildings into affordable, accessible production spaces for performance, visual arts and digital media.
CGD adopted a co-design approach to developing the ‘Creative Industries Space’ to ensure that the outcome meets community aspirations and caters for emerging artforms. The intent is also to build community and develop a model for future community participation in infrastructure development.
CGD engaged Big Space to facilitate the first phase of co-design, working with Williams Ross Architects (WRA). After establishing the co-design group, Big Space led the intensive collaboration, beginning with knowledge sharing and visioning then moving through iterations of design, and concluding with an evaluation of the process. Big Space facilitated workplace tours, experience mapping, scenario testing, options development and deliberations to reach the preferred concept.
The co-design group included 33 local creators and industry experts with diverse creative practices, cultural backgrounds, identities, ages and abilities. Bunurong Traditional Owners, local creative organisations and leading creative industry advocates worked alongside CGD staff and WRA’s multidisciplinary design team.
The resulting concept design converts the existing building into 4 levels of dedicated making spaces for performance, visual and digital media with connecting multi-use spaces for learning, presenting and socialising. The process also produced initial guidance for technical services, programming and communications.
All participants expressed their appreciation of the design outcome as well as the experiences and learnings along the way. The local artists particularly valued being involved in problem-solving and decision-making, meeting other artists and discovering opportunities for future collaboration.
The community’s influence on the concept design is demonstrated in Big Space’s co-design report, which will guide ongoing design work and support fundraising for the Space. The co-design group will continue to be involved in the next stages. CGD has nominated the co-design project for a 2024 local government award.
