Organisers
Head of Art, Kelvin Grove State College
President, Queensland Art Teachers’ Association
Inaugural Smithsonian Queensland Design Education Fellow
Les is a secondary educator with a strong interest in bringing the excitement and the challenge of design thinking into the classroom.
Since 1999 he has been working with Peter Boyle of Verge Urban Landscape Architecture and Genevieve Searle from the City Planning Branch of Brisbane City Council, to develop and sustain the Living City Urban Design workshops for year 11 students.
Living City is now well established as a powerful force for connecting young people with design thinking about real places with real outcomes. More recently he has collaborated with design educator Natalie Wright from the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering at QUT to develop “Generation” - a series of design based workshops for students and teachers. These workshops became an integral part of the program of Queensland’s first Asia-Pacific Design Triennial in October last year.
These events, in addition to Natalie’s goDesign workshops in regional schools, are all contributing to greater design awareness, higher community activism and more innovative thinking about our shared futures on the part of young Queenslanders.
Public Art Officer
Brisbane City Council
Genevieve has managed new and existing public art for the city of Brisbane for over fifteen years in her position with Brisbane City Council. In that time she has been part of the growth in number and diversity of the elements that comprise the city’s art in public spaces, as well as influencing works installed in private developments through the council’s planning and building requirements. Genevieve sees that public art is very much part of communicating, complementing and, in some ways, determining the cultural literacy of the broader city community. It is both a reflection and an agitator - always evolving, sometimes challenging, but never resiling from delivering an authentic cultural response to place and to the city.
Prior to joining BCC in 1993, Genevieve worked in both local government and community sector based organisations in Victoria. Her roles during this time were mainly in the community development sphere, but also in bringing community, business and development together through communication, finding common ground and realising projects that formed from that basis.
Genevieve has been a driving force to initiate Living City and maintain the program, connecting it to all manner of projects that are relevant to BCC and the life of Brisbane itself. She is always on the look out for interesting projects and is in the best place to view what’s coming in the city’s continual pipeline of major development and more subtle intervention. All are seen as rich sources of interest for the participants in our program, as well as prime candidates for the input of the young people of our city and its environs.
Director
VERGE Urban Landscape Architecture
Peter is a registered Landscape Architect and co-director of VERGE, an independent Landscape Architectural practice driven by a strong contemporary design philosophy framed by the holistic sustainability of communities.
The company’s interests extend from the broad scale urban environment, its fabric, transitions and margins, to finer scale design elements that contribute to the formation of ‘places’ or the invigoration of existing ones.
Peter has a strong interest in identifying the groups that comprise a community and how their individual and collective voices may be actively engaged to achieve high quality design outcomes that are both meaningful and have resonance for those who become end-users. He is also an agitator and advocate for the arts, directing this into his practice through creative interventions within the public realm and at public/private interfaces to both affirm place and reconcile aspects of community sustainability within the context of the built environment.