Anthology 2011 Exhibition

04 July 2006

A major exhibition was held by Melbourne-based design group CobaltNiche recently to mark the design company’s tenth birthday celebrations.

The exhibition was divided into two parts; one representing the past, and the other a glimpse of the future.

‘ANTHOLOGY’ was a chronological collection of products designed by CobaltNiche. Starting from 1996, each year was represented by one product. Built-up over the 11 products on display the collection gives a strong insight into the nature of the group’s work. Also displayed for each year is background information about the company and images of other significant projects over that period. These outline the development of the company from a two-man start-up to a broadly-based 15-staff design consultancy with clients spread over 3 continents.

According to CobaltNiche director Steve Martinuzzo, selecting which product to showcase for each year was not easy. “We wanted to have a broad representation of the products we’ve worked on. In the early years this was pretty straightforward, but for later years, when the volume of projects are higher, it was difficult to limit the exhibition to just one project” said Steve. Interestingly, 6 of the ‘Anthology’ products were designed for overseas based clients or for predominantly export markets.

Whilst ‘ANTHOLOGY’ was a look at the past, ‘2011’ shows the group’s vision of the future, in this case the next generation of Melbourne transport design. This collection of work included sketch renderings of alternative tram designs culminating in a scale model of the ‘Melba 2011’; CobaltNiche’s interpretation of the classic W-Class tram.

Both exhibitions highlighted CobaltNiche’s brand of creative, accountable and commercially-focused design. It was refreshing that all of the projects on display (except for the tram) were real, profit-making products, contributing to Australian jobs and our emerging global reputation as being a place for intelligent design. With the quality and significance of the manufacturing companies included within the exhibits, ‘ANTHOLOGY 2011’ also demonstrated the tangible benefit good design can make to local and national manufacturing industries.