Welcome to The Edge – Christian Duell
Greetings! My name is Christian Duell and I will be working for the next six months as a Catalyst at The Edge in the business of environmental sustainability. My background is in architecture but I am also a musician and more recently I’ve established my own business White Light working on public art and architecture.
How did I end up here? I think it has something to do with a volcano. I was planning to gallivant around Iceland and Scandinavia for a few months earlier in the year until a certain volcano changed my plans. With all flights to Europe cancelled indefinately I spontaneously found myself in Egypt and then later stumbled on a short residency opportunity at a digital media centre in Madrid, Spain called Medialab Prado. This was an amazing experience for me, working with creative people from all around the world in disciplines I previously didn’t even know existed! We worked hard, partied hard and the project I collaborated on VirtualUrban got me very excited about a new direction combining digital media and architecture. I left Madrid thinking ‘wouldn’t it be great if there was a place like this in Brisbane’.
During my first week home in Brisbane in August I got involved in a workshop run by former Edge resident Beh Wattenburg that involved hacking old kids’ toys to make new kinds of machines. Fun! Turns out there was a place like this in Brisbane and I had found myself a new home.
So my time at The Edge is about bringing people together. I’m passionate about chance encounters and the beautiful things that happen when likeminded people cross paths. To me this is the greatest potential about The Edge; a central place for people from different backgrounds to come together, share ideas and make things happen!
I’ll be sharing my knowledge in environmental sustainability gained in my practice as an architect but I also hope to act as a facilitator of different perspectives on sustainability. Hopefully we can all learn from each other!
So keep an eye out shortly for some workshops I will be facilitating. Firstly a fun guerrilla art project (involving guerrilla gardening, seed bombing and moss graffiti) and later a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) project that allows designers to quickly and simply measure the environmental impact of their design decisions.
In the meantime, check out the upcoming Tipping Point conference happening nationally and being hosted right here in Brisbane at the Edge from 11 – 13 November.
That’s all for now. You’ll be hearing more from me and my fellow catalysts over the next few months and I look forward to getting to know a few of you during my time here. If you want to get in touch or share some ideas on environmental sustainability please comment below or contact me via The Edge.
Filed Under: Sustainability
[...] instalment. TEDxYouth@Brissie will explore the theme Be The Change, and The Edge’ s very own Christian Duell will be on hand to provoke discussion. Other notable speakers include Benjamin Law and Thom [...]