DIA Hall of Fame 2023 Announced
Adam Goodrum, Celina Clarke, Harley Anstee, Ian Wong, Maryanne Milazzo, Paul Cockburn, Richard Haughton James and Stafford Cliff
Today the Design Institute of Australia (DIA), Australia's peak national body for the design industry, announces the names of eight eminent Australian designers to be inducted into the DIA – Hall of Fame for 2023. Induction into the DIA Hall of Fame signifies an outstanding body of work, contribution to the Australian design industry or achievement in furthering the profession. It is the ultimate industry recognition for design leaders across the industry, and this year, it spans the industrial, furniture, interior, and graphic design disciplines.
"We are delighted and heartened by today's announcement. For over 25 years, the DIA's Hall of Fame program has promoted designers, their influential contributions and unremitting outcomes. In recent years, the DIA has focused on design that reflects diversity, equality, and our social and cultural needs. The impressive list of Hall of Fame inductees celebrates and reminds us of the power of design, its impact and how we live."
—DIA President Gavin Campbell FDIA
“This year’s inductees into the DIA Hall of Fame represent the breadth and depth of Australia’s design talent. From founders of our industry to living legends, from creators of iconic products to quiet achievers, all have worked tirelessly to nurture the Australian Design Industry and to bring it to the world.”
—James Harper LFDIA, DIA Hall of Fame Committee Chair
The DIA – Hall of Fame 2023 Inductees are:
Adam Goodrum
Industrial and Furniture Design
Adam Goodrum is widely acknowledged as the most successful, currently practising furniture designer in Australia. His output in Australia and internationally is prolific and includes pieces for Cappellini, Alessi, Norman Copenhagen, Louis Vuitton, Cult and Tait.
He designs with the philosophy that an object must justify its existence – through its story and detailing. For this reason, his designs celebrate process and craftsmanship and accentuate components and joinery to create functional pieces with spirit and personality.
Raised in Perth WA, Goodrum loved art and mathematics at school and considered a career as an artist but ended up studying Industrial Design at the University of Technology (UTS) in Sydney, where he later had an academic role for a number of years. He is frequently called upon to feature in industry and public talks about design practice and mentors other designers by allowing them to intern in his studio.
He became prominent when he designed the Stitch Chair for Cappellini, exhibited at the Milan Furniture Fair 2008. He then designed tabletop products for Alessi and Norman Copenhagen, the Riddling Stool as a project for Veuve Clicquot and Big Talk originally commissioned by Kvadrat later put into production by Swedish company Blå Station.
Closer to home, he has designed several furniture ranges for Cult, including Fat Tulip and Molloy, recently used in Hermes showrooms and the Trace collection for Tait. He is a founding member of Broached Commissions and is one half of A&A, a collectible design practice focussed on unique straw marquetry furniture pieces.
Goodrum’s work has been awarded various design accolades, including the NGV Rigg Prize, Vogue x Alessi Design Prize, Bombay Sapphire Design Discovery Award, Indesign Luminary Award and the Idea Awards Editor’s Medal. His work has also been included in exhibitions and collections at Powerhouse / MAAS, Art Gallery WA, NGV, NGA, London Design Museum and the Gent Design Museum, Belgium.
Celina Clarke FDIA
Industrial Design
Celina Clarke is a Founding Director and Senior Industrial Designer at ISM Objects, a leading Australian designer and manufacturer of quality contemporary lighting.
Celina completed a Bachelor of Arts (Industrial Design) at RMIT, and a Certificate IV – Lighting Engineering & Design (RMIT) and soon established a career as a leader in lighting design while contributing to the creativity, integrity and advancement of Australian design.
In partnership with Simon Christopher, ISM Objects' work has received multiple awards and is held in significant collections, including MOMA New York, the Powerhouse Museum NSW and the National Gallery of Victoria.
In 1994, the company developed, designed and produced the iconic Madame Ruby Lamp, made from post-industrial waste. The lamp was featured in the highly acclaimed 'Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design' exhibition at New York's MOMA in 1995. The following year, its international success continued as part of the 'Re(f)use Exhibition', which toured throughout the US, Europe and Asia. Ruby was also featured in the book '50 Lights' by US author Mel Byers.
For more than 30 years, Celina's work has been driven by discovery, possibility and problem solving and the satisfaction of transforming an idea into a successful product.
Her commitment to design is further expressed through her past 7-year appointment as Chair of the Victorian Premier's Design Awards from 2016 to 2023 and as a Board Member and Vice President of Craft Victoria.
Celena was featured in the DIA's 2014 exhibition 'Women in Design', 'Designing Women' at the NGV and the ICONIC Australian Design exhibition curated by Ian Wong.
Harley Anstee FDIA
Interior Design
Harley Anstee FDIA has been an interior design practitioner since 1963 and has worked at Nexus Designs since 1975. He has been instrumental in establishing the fundamental principles of Nexus Designs and advancing the overall Australian design vernacular. With a design approach predicated on timelessness and a passion for celebrating the beauty of our natural environment, Harley also has an expert knowledge of Australian and international furniture design and contemporary Australian art.
Over five decades, Harley has drawn inspiration from Australia’s natural beauty in determining the colour palettes and finishes for Australian building products, including BlueScope’s COLORBOND® steel. Harley’s original and intelligent problem-solving and deep understanding of the Australian landscape has also allowed him to lead the Product Development team at Nexus Designs to define product ranges for brands such as Boral, Laminex, Dulux, Armstrong Nylex, Telecom, Black & Decker, Sorbent, Sheridan, Kenbrock Flooring, PGH Bricks and BlueScope Steel as industry leaders in their fields. His comprehensive research and colour advice has assisted companies to develop new products and ranges that deliver product differentiation, competitive advantage and improve market share for companies that also include Johnson Tiles, Haymes Paint, Armstrong Flooring and Viridian Glass.
A highlight of Harley’s interior design career was assisting the Nexus team in developing the original Country Road concept store and setting the design standards for all Country Road stores throughout Australia and New Zealand for almost a decade. Another pivotal project came in 1983 when Nexus Designs was appointed by Philip Cox Richardson and Taylor, Architects as interior designers to the Yulara Tourist Resort at Uluru. Nexus Designs also acted as design consultants for the refurbishment of Government House, Canberra and the refurbishment of Admiralty House, Sydney, and Harley has designed for innumerable residential clients, including the owners of a Tribeca Loft in New York, for which Nexus’ work won the International Design and Residential categories at the Australian Interior Design Awards in 2013.
A DIA member since 1992, Harley has been actively involved throughout his career, including working to improve the recognition of the interior design profession and elevating its professional standards. He has also been instrumental in mentoring many of today’s successful interior design practitioners.
His contribution has been acknowledged with a DIA fellowship in 2007, an InDesign Luminaries Award in 2014 and through Nexus Designs’ significant interior design awards on the national and international stage. Throughout his career, Harley has co-authored books on Interior Design including The Making of a House, Living and most notably Using Australian Colour, a renowned reference book for practitioners of design that has been published in three editions.
Ian Wong FDIA
Industrial Design
Ian Wong is an award-winning industrial designer, collector, curator and senior lecturer at Monash University.
Ian has been invited to curate exhibitions about his research on Australian Design in; Milan, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Suzhou, Sydney, Adelaide, Launceston, Melbourne and his hometown of Shepparton. Exhibitions have included EVERYDAY Australian Design, 100 Objects | Australian Design in the home, I-CONIC Australian Design, 60 Years of Good Design, BlackBOX – Design and Innovation | Melbourne Australia, Innovators – Australian Design and Innovation, Zmood – Designing Holdens, and 150 Years of Design in Victoria.
The Ian Wong Collection has been a work in progress associated with his research and currently has over 2100 objects designed by Australian designers.
Products designed by Ian as a director of EJO Design have ranged from one-off objects like the RMIT University Ceremonial Mace to brain-scanning equipment, Antarctic sleds, and million-dollar high-speed agricultural sorting equipment. Ranges like the pak range for Silvan Australia have recently been reported as the ‘hills hoist’ of rural Australian farm life. This range continues to create significant commercial success for Silvan. Ian’s first product for Silvan, the trukpak, was designed in 1989 and is still very successful, and most farms in Australia would have an effect designed by Ian.
Ian is currently Director of the Monash Art Design and Architecture Industrial Design Centre (Kunshan) and Program Director – Master of Industrial Design at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University. This double Master’s degree is delivered at the Southeast University-Monash University Joint Graduate School Suzhou in China. In 2021 Ian was awarded a Good Design Australia’s Gold Design for Design Research. Ian is the President of the Melbourne Movement and the China representative and Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia.
Maryanne Milazzo FDIA
Interior Design
Maryanne Milazzo is an interior design pioneer. She is a significant group of design practitioners who became the first female directors of interior design and architecture practices in South Australia.
A South Australian Institute of Technology (SAIT) graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Interior Design, Maryanne Milazzo achieved a long and impressive track record in architecture and design.
She worked for leading architectural practices, managed three architecture and interior design businesses in Adelaide and Sydney and was a founding partner of Hardy Milazzo Architects and Interior Design. As Director at Hardy Milazzo, she led projects across various portfolios, including Corporate Workplaces, Retail, Hospitality, Education, Alternative Living, Heritage and Residential.
She has been involved in various major infrastructure projects, working with government, corporate clients and project construction managers. These projects include the EDS Asia- Pacific Resource Centre headquarters and its specialised high-tech marketing centre in North Terrace, Adelaide, with office accommodation for the state government department of information industries and the Playford Centre. Hardy Milazzo provided the complete architectural and interior design services for the 8,000 square metres fit-out within the 11-storey building. Projects of similar scale included the BAE Systems headquarters, Bendigo Bank, and the Adelaide offices of the South Australia Police.
Maryanne is a past Board Member of KOJO, a national content, digital, events and post-production provider. Milazzo was elevated to a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia. In 2017, she was acknowledged as a South Australian Design Icon by the Design Institute of Australia.
Paul Cockburn
Industrial Design
Australian industrial designer Paul Cockburn studied at the Ealing School of Art, London, in the late 1960s and subsequently formed his design studio, Design Field, in 1969.
Paul returned home to Sydney in the 1970s, and his Design Field consultancy was one of only a few industrial design consultancies in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s, where he took on partners and staff and operated to great acclaim. The firm undertook diverse client projects, including Apple Computer, AWA, Acrow, Tytel, Victa, Black and Decker, and Eveready.
The group's most recognised project is the redesign of the Eveready Dolphin Lantern in 1972 and again in 1988.
Under Paul's leadership, Design Field was the first Industrial Design consultancy in the country to offer a regular work experience program for secondary and tertiary students. Paul was influential in the careers of many Australian designers through employment and offering work experience and mentoring. Students went on to head significant consultancies, expanding the profession's influence and providing opportunities for scores of other designers, contributing much to the design field in Australia. As well as growing the consulting design industry, he was instrumental in shaping an Australian approach to the design of functional objects.
Designs that he and his design team created are featured in the permanent collection of the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences and feature in almost every exhibit of Australian industrial design.
Paul was an invited member of the National Design Review Steering Committee responsible for creating the 'Australia – Competing by Design' publication through The Australian Academy of Design and published in March 1995.
A vocal commentator on all design matters, Paul moved into a celebrated career as an automotive reviewer/writer for both Wheels and Motor Magazine. He continued to be an invited Australian Design Awards judge until his passing in 2021.
Richard Haughton James
Industrial and Graphic Design
After arriving in Sydney, Richard Haughton James established and ran the Design Centre from 1939 to 1940 with Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, whom he had earlier met in London. In 1939 he worked with publisher Sydney Ure Smith to establish the Design Industries Association of Australia (DIAA), of which Ure Smith was the President and James the Secretary.
The second world war interrupted this activity, and during the war, James designed Commonwealth Government war recruitment posters and worked with the Military Education Council. Throughout his career in Australia, James was passionately committed to raising people's understanding of modern art, design and photography, and is credited with helping to develop a more enlightened attitude to modern art and industrial design through articles, talks, radio broadcasts and publications and his association with organisations like the Australian Society of Designers for Industry, the National Gallery Society of Victoria, the Contemporary Art Society of NSW, the Victorian Artists Society, the Royal Society of Arts, London and the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists Association (ACIAA). In 1947 he was elected the President of the Society of Designers for Industry (SDI), a precursor to the DIA, and remained in the role until 1955.
In 1949 Melbourne designers Max Forbes and Richard Haughton James designed the Red Cross Modern Homes Exhibition. The exhibition's highlight was a model home designed by Robin Boyd called 'The House of Tomorrow', with furniture made for the house by Grant Featherston.
James and John Briggs set up the advertising agency Briggs and James in Melbourne in 1952. By the time he retired from advertising in the mid-sixties, James was Joint Managing Director of Briggs, Canny, James and Paramor, then Australia's sixth-largest advertising agency.
James retired from the advertising business in 1964 to devote himself to painting which he had started in 1962. He held exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney between 1965 and 1966 and moved to live in Positano, Italy, in 1966, revisiting Australia several times. Retrospective exhibitions of his painting were held at the McClelland Galleries, Langwarrin and Gryphon Gallery, Melbourne State College in Victoria between 1979 and 1980.
Stafford Cliff
Graphic Design
Stafford Cliff is Australia's most successful and prolific designer, art director and interior, food and lifestyle publications author. He designed the iconic Habitat catalogues for Terence Conran's UK retail chain for ten years from 1971 and was Creative Director of the multidisciplinary Conran Design Group in the 1980s. In 1974 he designed The House Book, the biggest-selling home book ever. This was followed by the Style series and over 60 other books and magazines.
Stafford was born in Gawler near Adelaide in 1946 and studied Advertising Art at the SA School of Art from 1962 to 1965 whilst working as a Commercial Artist. He then relocated to London and worked at Conran Design Group (CDG) with Sir Terence Conran in 1966. In 1971 he moved to the fledgling furniture company Habitat, also run by Conran. There he became Art Director for the Habitat Catalogue and significantly influenced the design language of the retail chain, which grew to 47 stores globally by 1980.
Stafford returned to CDG as Graphic Design Director in 1979 and became Group Creative Director in 1986, at which time it was one of the largest multidisciplinary design groups in the world. He oversaw the three divisions of Products, Interiors and Graphics. He designed a new CDG logo, incorporating a yellow triangle, red circle and blue square to represent each division and design discipline.
While working at CDG, Stafford began collaborating with author/publisher Suzy Slesin and photographer Gilles De Chabaneix and others on the Style Series of books, including English, French, Caribbean, Japanese, and Greek styles. The books became a publishing phenomenon and helped launch the trend for beautiful and stylish 'coffee table' books.
He left CDG in 1990 to work full-time on book design and art direction. Cliff’s notable publication design projects include Metropolitan Home Magazine UK, the Everyday Things book series, The Way We Live (plus six spin-offs), 1000 Garden Ideas and 1000 Home Ideas.
Stafford's favourite quote, which exemplifies his life and career, is 'My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to excel, and to do so with some passion, some compassion and humour, and some style'.
The DIA Hall of Fame Committee is composed of practising designers and industry figures from various design disciplines and regions. Each year it comprehensively reviews and assesses nominations against a robust set of criteria.
Over 130 designers have been inducted since the program’s inception in 1996. The DIA – Hall of Fame is an enduring record of the Australian design industry's visionaries, leaders, ambassadors, and contributors. It showcases Australia's design forecasters, our past heroes, and celebrates their significant contribution to Australia's economic development and cultural identity. Past inductees include Susan Cohn, Collette Dinnigan, Garry Emery, Grant and Mary Featherston, Akira Isogowa, Khai Liew, Marc Newson and
many more.
This year's esteemed designers will be inducted at the DIA's Awards Ceremony on 2 November in Sydney. Buy tickets HERE. They will join the Designers Australia Awards 2023 winners and the Madeline Lester Graduate of the Year Award 2023 recipient.