VA - Pattern Language (2022)

Pattern Studio's Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain were invited to participate in the annual Chairity event, as part of Melbourne Design Week 2022. Each year, designers and creatives are asked to reinterpret, reimagine, and rethink a specific chair based on a brief, with the resulting pieces exhibited in both Melbourne and Sydney before being auctioned off for charity. This year, designers were asked to work with Hay's Result Chair as a starting point toward "civic good."

With this in mind, Pattern Studio created Musical Chair as an opportunity to bring the community together over a single chair after years of being asked to keep one or more seats apart. Featuring two Bang & Olufsen bluetooth speakers within custom upholstered backrests, Musical Chair allows wireless audio playback in any location. The digital compilation album, Pattern Language—curated by the studio’s collaborator Traianos Pakioufakis and issued by ROOM40—was pieced together especially for the exhibition. Featuring seven previously unreleased works from Australian composers, the set acts as both an accompaniment and response to the chair itself whilst digitally available beyond the exhibition and auction spaces. All proceeds from the Bandcamp sales of Pattern Language will go to Healing Foundation, supporting the healing of Stolen Generations' survivors, families, and communities.

The compilation title and studio name both borrow from a term coined by architect Christopher Alexander in his 1977 book, A Pattern Language. The term is defined as “an organised and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise.”