Friday 22 May
10am – 11.30am
Saturday 23 May
4.30pm – 6pm
North Magdalen Laundry
Friday 22 May
10am – 11.30am
Saturday 23 May
4.30pm – 6pm
North Magdalen Laundry
UnitePlayPerform Playshops are where information goes to get messy before it gets wise.
Play as Prototype is a 90-minute immersive Playshop facilitated by Melissa Gilbert for designers, artists, architects, and cultural leaders ready to test ideas in real time. Using reclaimed materials from UPP’s Reclaim and Transform Initiative, participants move through rapid cycles of building, breaking, and re-making, guided by the UnitePlayPerform methodology: Disarm → Disrupt → Unite → Play → Perform → Transform.
This is not about perfection. It is about testing, moving, and beginning.
Set within the evolving ecosystem of the Abbotsford Convent, this session transforms reclaimed festival waste, discarded materials, knitting and plastic scraps from innovation partners KNOVUS and DEFY Design, and design experiments into a living, breathing laboratory for emergent ideas. Through tactile, somatic, and collective exercises, participants explore how concepts, forms, systems, and behaviours shift through repetition, interaction, movement, and play.
We have been taught to refine, perfect, and produce. But before that, we knew how to prototype. To feel. To test. To fail. To play. Somewhere along the way, many of us lost touch with this. Play as Prototype reactivates play as a full-body intelligence not as a break from work, but as a method for creating momentum, interrupting inherited behaviours, and opening new pathways for thinking, making, and relating.
Participants will work with reclaimed and transformed materials, build temporary forms and gestures, then reshape them in real time. Together, we ask: what habits are we unconsciously repeating? How do we move from extraction to reclamation? What becomes possible when we design with materials, rather than simply from them?
As Melissa Gilbert says, Play is the Mess Hall — a place where ideas are composted, not consumed.
Come get messy. Trust the unknown. Prototype what does not yet exist.
Reclaim and Transform Initiative – Material Innovation Partners
KNOVUS
DEFY Design
Melissa Gilbert
Described by Australian Design Review as “an exemplar of socially engaging art,” and recognised for “excelling in producing socially engaging work,” Melissa Gilbert is known as a “cultural disruptor” (Broadsheet) and was selected for NGV’s Melbourne Design Fair – Discovery, spotlighting the next generation of design leaders. She is the Founder of UnitePlayPerform, a living intelligence studio activating embodied systems change, and co-founder of The Nest Creative Space, Australia’s largest grassroots creative production studio community. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Rockhampton Museum of Art, the Museum of Brisbane, and MONA, VIVID, Museum of Old and New Art, alongside international exhibitions. Her work has been featured in Vogue and highlighted by ArtsHub as one of the top exhibitions at the Museum of Brisbane for Play Moves. Gilbert is also a keynote speaker and has partnered with Purpose Conference and Adapt NSW as Creative & Wellbeing Partner, and serves as an advisor to the Symbiocene Institute. She is a scholarship recipient of the Masters of Business & Empathy (MBE) at Small Giants Academy, as well as the International Impact Safari—supporting her global leadership in relational culture, systems change, and embodied practice.
