Design.
Regret.
Confess.

Design. Regret. Confess. is an installation that transforms a very small delivery truck into a mobile confession booth for the design community. Hidden in plain sight, this installation will visit various Melbourne Design Week locations to provide a small space to purge the messier, often concealed realities, of professional practice. This will act as a counter discourse to “design” as an instrument of value creation and the designer as problem solver. The confessional serves as a sanctuary for design's dirty secrets, where practitioners can anonymously confess their professional disasters, ethical compromises, and moments of spectacular failure. Using AI-powered voice recognition, these confessions are captured and carefully anonymised before being broadcast once on a stark digital display before disappearing.

Operating throughout Melbourne Design Week, the installation collects stories ranging from catastrophic oversights to moral grey areas and shame: creating a powerful testament to design's capacity for both triumph and disaster. These confessions will be compiled into a limited-edition publication, "Design. Regret. Confess: An Honest Archive," to be printed as the confessions are made using UV unstable ink on paper. This temporary document acts as a metaphor for both the erasure of failures, and the largely ephemeral nature of design outputs.

The project collects and features anonymous contributions from Melbourne's design community in a participatory way and from local and international practitioners' via a website. It aims to make space to explore the tensions between design's polished exteriors and its dirty interiors: the things we are disinclined to divulge in public.

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we conduct this project (Naarm/Melbourne). We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.