Fiona Lyda is the Founder and Managing Director of renowned Sydney design emporium Spence and Lyda. For the past 25 years Lyda’s curatorial eye has found and fostered exceptional and up and coming makers and their stories via her Sydney showroom and new Melbourne Showroom slated for launch May 2022. Hers is a consistent celebration of craftsmanship, materiality and unquenchable passion for preserving and celebrating Earth’s natural resources. A vision of beauty with meaning, that has been widely regarded in the Australian press and abroad. And a vision for ‘designing the future we want’,  that underpins her Futures Collective showcase of exceptional talent brought to Melbourne’s Villa Alba, Kew, for Melbourne Design Week 2022.

Álvaro Catalán de Ocón is an award-winning designer at the helm of Madrid-based production and distribution firm ACdO, famed for their championing of multiculturalism, craftsmanship, and sustainability through functional objects of exceptional beauty.

Headlining Spence and Lyda’s works for Futures Collective at Melbourne Design Week 2022 – the acclaimed international designer will unveil his incredible Plastic Rivers series to Australian audiences for the very first time – marking 2.0 in his quest to ‘design the future we want’, ten years after the launch of his PET Lamps series that swept the world by storm.

Founder of Fiona Lynch Studios, Fiona Lynch’s crafted aesthetic, harmonises raw and refined, polished and supple details, into cohesive spaces that are intuitive musings on tactility, depth, light and shadow. Included in her works are alliances with contemporary artists and skilled artisans – from ceramicists to sculptors and metalworkers – a journey together that’s led to her first capsule collection of sustainable furniture comprising coffee tables in assorted geometric configurations, plus sofa and armchair. The resulting Workshop x Future Collection launches as part of Futures Collective at Villa Alba Kew, for Melbourne Design Week, 2022.

Former editor-at-large of BELLE Magazine, AMS was part of the team that established SPACE Furniture and ran Space Sydney for a decade. After running her own design-driven marketing agency in the 90’s and naughties,  AMS has helmed the AUTHENTIC DESIGN ALLIANCE since 2015 to actively advocate for IP law changes, and to educate about the importance of supporting, promoting and specifying original products, materials and brands. She also hosts the DESIGN-MADE podcast, launching March 2022.

Clean, functional resolution is typical of Ash Allen’s sophisticated approach to design. Trained in engineering as well as in furniture design, his expertise is in negotiating the entire product life cycle in his head, before his hands begin to work. From concept to material, to form, to making, to market, Allen’s is a resourceful way of design thinking. All That Glitters.. (Is Not Gold!) is a selling exhibition of one-off interpretations of modern furnishing icons. It doubles as a statement on the replica furniture industry’s caging of design talent, and the way in which copied designs harm culture and the environment as well as the industry at large. Ash Allen’s work is curated and produced for the Futures Collective MDW’22 by ADA® AUTHENTIC DESIGN ALLIANCE as part of their ongoing mission to educate and campaign for the support, promotion and specification of original products, materials and brands.

Internationally acclaimed Designer Jon Goulder founded his studio in 1996 after graduating from Canberra School of Art. His body of work since, grounds him as a stand-out Australian designer, who is widely acknowledged as having made long lasting contributions to the Australian design industry. Goulder’s work has featured in a number of major exhibitions and publications around the world. He was the inaugural winner of the Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award, the winner of the Hobart Art Prize and People’s Choice Award, and his work is held in permanent collections by many State and National Museums and Art Galleries including the National Gallery of Australia.

Lou Weis is a creative director who has worked extensively across the arts industry. His work focuses on historical waves of globalisation and how each transforms our experience of material culture. The purest expression of this interest is Broached Commissions, founded 2010. Broached Commissions is a research and narrative driven production studio whose works are held in significant private and public collections internationally. Lou’s portfolio includes creation of large-scale installations for international arts festivals, such as the Melbourne and Singapore Festivals in 2000, 2003 and 2004, Tokyo Design festival 2008 and directorship of Melbourne Design Week 2010. His strategic thinking extends to work with both state and federal governments and major property development companies to deliver strategy documents. covering topics such as product design, public art and public realm strategy. Since 2015 Lou has been the creative director of numerous public art programs, including large precinct developments by Mirvac, Lendlease, Caydon and Charter Hall.

Marlo Lyda is an Australian born designer-maker, and recent graduate from the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL). Her practice embraces fieldwork and intuitive process as means of challenging widely accepted industrial techniques and the by-products of production. Coaxing her delicate and functional objects from materials that are undervalued and disregarded, Marlo believes industry offers a “provocative intersection” where value can be redefined.