Consider your run-of-the-mill puffer jacket: although an everyday sight on Melbourne winter streets, it is fearfully and wonderfully made. Its materials – nylon, polyester – come from the fossilised remains of ancient sea creatures, extracted as non-renewable crude oil by the petroleum industry, its chemical byproducts transformed into plastic fibres. The supply chains it passed through are opaque and likely exploitative, and it may last its wearers a few winters before it languishes in a wardrobe, or a shipping container, or in landfill. Then, over decades, it will disintegrate into microplastics that persist in waterways and soils.Enter the ‘sustainable’ puffer jacket.
Increasingly, today’s puffer jackets may have any number of green claims attached to them. Perhaps their shell or wadding is not from virgin plastic, but plastic water bottles, collected, ground down and re-extruded into a recycled fibre? Or perhaps the down filling may be from ethically sourced goose down? Still, this puffer jacket is only ‘less bad’, creating less harm.
For decades now, sustainable or eco-designers have been minimising harm to create greener products, with a drive to substitute a ‘bad’ material or process with a ‘better’ one. Paradoxically, though, the more mainstream so-called sustainable products have become, the more perilous the state of the living world seems to be.
Less bad has clearly not been good enough.
The NGV exhibition Making Good: Redesigning the Everyday takes creating more goodness – in all its forms – as the central premise. Through an array of over fifty everyday objects and services, the exhibition presents designs that create wide-ranging benefits beyond their immediate function.
These are designs used in daily life for care, clothing, food, housing and communication. Each display has a point of difference from their conventional form: in diverse ways, the makers have sought to go beyond minimising harm to actively create goodness in the world.
Some examples are products that align with a circular economy that is just and restorative. They replace a virgin resource with a byproduct otherwise wasted. The Oyster Terrazzo, from architecture practice Besley and Spresser, combines local oyster shell waste with cement, ochres and recycled marble. Coffee grinds added to concrete strengthen it by 30 per cent, an innovation by Dr Rajeev Roychand and team from RMIT University. Pelagic has formed bricks harvested from ocean plastic.
Some designs speak to cultural regeneration through encouraging changed mindsets: Rubies creates gender-affirming clothing for trans women and girls. The baseline is that the garments are sustainably and ethically made, but the true impact lies in creating clothing that includes, rather than excludes. Other examples, like Australia Post’s Traditional Place Names campaign, are simple interventions in everyday actions, like addressing a parcel, that can have a ripple effect in creating societal change.
And one of the examples is a puffer jacket: the Pangaia puffer jacket is padded with a novel bio-based flower down. As well as being a lower impact biomaterial, the growth of the flowers supports ecosystem regeneration, and at end of life, the material can be biodegraded. Other examples of restorative practices include Jenny Underwood and Leanne Zilka’s lightweight knitted building facades. The designers propose these as speculative ways to retrofit the built environment, with the structures able to hold plants that can sequester carbon. Another example, available now, is a paint from Gush containing additives that improve and purify the air quality of the room.
Overall, many examples in the exhibition align with regenerative thinking, holistically and actively seeking to restore, heal, and care for people and the living world. Designing to regenerate means to understand one’s work as embedded within living systems, what Daniel Wahl terms ‘interbeing’, with life and as life. This core of regenerative thinking – ways of being that are relational and interconnected – is intrinsic in many First Nations knowledge systems and has been for millennia.
Growing the goodness, keeping promises
For decades now, design exhibitions have promised sustainable futures by showcasing what could be: perhaps dissolvable dresses that nourish the soil or bioluminescent trees that light our streets. These have promised us (often a wealthy ‘us’) a bright green, techno-optimistic future; yet it’s a future that never quite materialises.
Here in the messy real world, many innovations are stymied by market forces that privilege exploitation over justice. Start-ups with new biomaterials find themselves co-opted by multinational brands who like their story for its feel-good sheen but will not invest to truly scale them.
What is exciting, and different, about many examples in Making Good is that many are not speculative but are happening right now, available for use and engagement here in Australia. Still, questions remain as to if these designs are novelties, or part of a growing movement for genuine change.
The title of the exhibition, ‘making good’, has a helpful ambiguity that captures some of these tensions, and points to ways forward to scale regenerative design up and out.
There are at least three interpretations of the idiom ‘to make good’. First, the phrase can be read literally: these designers and innovators are seeking to make good products and systems that also create many forms of goodness for both people and the living world.
Or, to make good is to accrue wealth and move up the social ladder. Unfortunately, in a world of growing inequality where there are few consequences for degenerating nature, those who ‘make good’ often do so at others’ expense.
But to make good can also mean to keep a promise, and a commitment to correct past wrongs. It is this last interpretation to hold on to. How are our institutions, governments, industries, going to meet the urgency of now and ‘make good’ on redressing past and present wrongs? Because, when viewing the exhibition, it is worth considering what is absent: not on display are the house paints that contain volatile organic compounds that off-gas into homes and environments, or the clothing that excludes and pollutes, or the ecosystems disrupted to mine virgin building materials.
Making Good represents dozens of hopeful lights of change to guide present and future design practice. It is the work of policy makers, educators, industries and the public to look behind these lights to confront the vast shadowed spaces of our everyday worlds that degenerate, rather than restore and heal.
For this reason, while an exhibition of tremendous hope, it must also be an exhibition that calls for action to make regenerative practice the norm, rather than the exception.
Making Good: Redesigning the Everyday is the first exhibition delivered as part of NGV’s renewed partnership with RMIT as the inaugural Futures Partner. See Making Good: Redesigning the Everyday at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until 1 February 2026. To see more from the selected designers, visit ngv.melbourne/exhibition/making-good/
This essay was originally commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for NGV Magazine, issue 55 Nov-Dec 2025.