A Serious Holiday: CASS

CASS was a symposium of New Zealand graphic designers held at the Cass Field Station for a weekend in November 2017. 

In the act of displacing ourselves from our typical urban environment to the remote, rural location of the Southern Alps, I hoped to create alternative frames of reference and methods of critical assessment. Being at Cass served to distance the familiar and the known, so that we could develop a new perspective of our practice from this outlying vantage point. 

To explore the collaborative nature of a small, seasoned group of designers, the group was asked to forget portfolio-talks, and instead focus on ‘what could be’ rather than 'what has been'. Each participant prepared a short proposal for a project that was yet to come to fruition—an idea, a possibility, a suggestion, a work in progress—that could be put to the group for casual discussion.

Participants included Janson Chau, Sarah Maxey, Luke Wood, Chippy Hutchinson, Warren Olds, Emma Kaniuk, Aaron Beehre, Noel Waite, Catherine Griffiths, Toby Curnow, Cait Johnson, Luke Shaw and Sarah Jane Parton.