Roger Kelly

Roger is based in Hawkes Bay and has a long history of designing furniture and objects, exhibiting alongside lecturing in 3D design.
My current research and practice focus on making objects that enhances people’s wellbeing by supporting our connections to place, to nature, ourselves and each other through deep materialism. My work contributes to the ongoing conversation about the value of our things and the value of the processes of craft, more specifically my research is focusing on the belief that a specific object should be, or could be signifiers or reminders of our needs, as such object making as a form of identity creation. In my role role as a design lecturer I am an advocate for designers and makers to be proactive in the realm of humanity centred design practices and to move into the circular economy.
The work within Platform 24 has a repurpose, reuse and recycle theme underlying many of the works and this is our step in the direction of this new role.
I am currently undertaking a Masters degree at Whitecliffe College – the MCEI, Master of creative Enterprise and Innovation.

Motivated by a mission to encourage understanding of design and how 3D world shapes us, just as we shape it, my imagination was captured when I came across Bruce Archer’s proposition in Design as Discipline (1979) that design is the third area of general education.
I sought to explore this potential by creating a system that allows the opportunity to learn the basic visual language of 3D form.

From this series of investigations and form making I felt the need to further explore the potential of this basic visual language along with scale and function. This series of speaker boxes is the result of this ongoing work.

Given the opportunity to utilise repurposed materials, timber and retro speakers I have created a symphony of vintage speaker boxes with Bluetooth capability.

Step into the world of the design greats, Prouve and Rams .

On a personal level I have sought to explore the inherent value within objects that have the potential to fulfil peoples spiritual, physical and psychological needs, to explore deep materialism – a spiritual connection to our material world and the changing relationship with objects and their making as a form of identity creation.