Patrizia Moroso On

Why Australian Designers Rule!

“It’s not something that I can prove, but it’s my gut feeling that in Australia and Asia there is a lot more creative freedom than there is in Europe. We have a heavy heritage and history of design, so we tend to get stuck in the same old boring traditional sofas and not break from that tradition enough. I hate that same old ‘grandma’s sofa’ approach to design. But because of Europe’s design heritage, it’s very common to continually go back to the classics, especially for the bigger design houses because they are safe, there is a security and confidence in those classics.

This however, gets in the way of research and experimentation, which means aiming to create something that has never existed before. And that’s what design should be – it’s about the ‘new’, if it already exists then what’s the point? In Europe this is a big problem, where true design is considered scary and a bit dangerous. Australia and Asia on the other hand are very new, and have a very different culture of design thinking. Good design needs to have roots somewhere, and Australian designers have younger roots; roots that are made up of the roots of many other places around the world, not just the one.

I think as well, Australia is one of the only places in the world that has a strong culture of female designers – there seems to be far more female designers than there are in Europe, which is just sensational. It’s almost like a rebellion against the traditional design establishment of mostly men who played it safe, and now we have women doing wonderful artistic and experimental things taking us in a whole new direction.”