Amid leading tours at Open House Dublin, hosting discussions at The Future, speaking at international events and continuing to share interviews and insights with the Irish design community here on the site, we have been hard at work behind the scenes to improve the 100 Archive website and experience and to find ways to increase our activity as an organisation. Having successfully established the 100 Archive we’re now at an important juncture. For the project to deliver on its aims and ambition we have to find ways to make it sustainable. Only if the project is active, relevant and stable will it remain a rich, informative and useful archive resource into the future.
First off, this means continuing to archive contemporary visual communication by designers in Ireland and Irish designers overseas. We want the archive to be a broad, diverse and inclusive representation of our industry, which means we need LOTS of you to submit LOTS of your work! The deadline for submissions to the 2017 Archive will be 28 February 2018, but as always, we encourage you to start submitting now so we can enjoy seeing your work be added to the website.
Secondly, with an active and sustainable organisation in mind, we engaged the services of Aideen McCole this time last year, working on a freelance basis to undertake administration and drive activity. Aideen is a curator and cultural producer who has completed a Masters in Curating Contemporary Design at Kingston University and the Design Museum, London. She has worked with organisations such as the Irish Architecture Foundation and the Victoria and Albert Museum and is co-founder of POST Design Festival, Copenhagen. We believe that Aideen has the vision, temperament, and energy to not only keep the archive running but to grow it into an impactful advocacy and activity platform for our industry. To achieve this we need funds.
We are in the process of exploring a number of funding strands with a view to establishing a stable annual revenue that can be used to retain Aideen’s expertise into the future. In fact, we are now one of eight organisations participating in the Business to Arts/Dublin’s Culture Connects’ Fundraising Fellowship, through which we will receive fundraising mentoring for the next twelve months. While routes such as public funding, sponsorship and advertising all offer some potential, the ideal situation is that our core annual costs are covered by an engaged community that understands the benefits of the site and feel they get value for their contributions of time and money. With this in mind, this winter we will launch the next iteration of the site which means increased functionality, some great new features and new ways to subscribe and submit. Here are the details:
Joining the site for free:
Joining the site as a designer in Ireland or an Irish designer overseas has always been free of charge and always will be. By joining the site you can list where you work now and have worked in the past and can always have your role acknowledged in projects submitted by others.
Pay as you go submissions:
Pay as you go submissions will increase in price from December to €30. From that date, pay as you go will also be restricted to first-time submitters, current students, those within three years of graduating from a design programme (any level, any country) or freelance practitioners. If that’s you, you will need to get in touch with us to let us know your status when buying credits.
Annual subscriptions with unlimited submissions:
In December we will introduce a variety of subscription options with different price brackets based on the size of your practice/studio. These come with lots of great new features to be revealed soon, including the option for anyone in the studio to submit work and basic editing abilities after submission.
Subscription prices:
Designer: if you’re submitting as an individual, your annual subscription for unlimited submissions will be €120 per year
Small studio, 1-5 designers: €360 per year
Medium studio, 6-10 designers: €480 per year
Large studio, 11+ designers: €600 per year
These changes don’t come into action until 1 December, so if you want to take advantage of current subscription/pay as you go prices (€100 individual subscription or €20 pay as you go), do it now!
Other planned changes for the site include institutional profiles for design schools to showcase the work of alumni featured in the archives, fundraising events and increased activity with sponsors and partners. If you have ideas, feedback or want to help out, get in touch!