marcus westbury

my life. on the internets.

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How the #NBN has (actually) changed my life

May 13th, 2013 192 Comments

It’s a quirk of fate and geography that our family home and my work at the Renew Australia office in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick are both smack bang in the middle of one of the first mainland rollout zones for the Australia’s fibre-to-the-home National Broadband Network. We’ve now been on it for more than a [...]

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Renewing the new? Early reflections from Docklands Spaces

April 27th, 2013 7 Comments

Renew Australia has been working on a pilot project Docklands Spaces in Melbourne with partners including Places Victoria, The City of Melbourne, and MAB corporation. Docklands, unlike Newcastle or Adelaide, or some of the other places the Renew model has been obviously useful to date is not an old area that has fallen on hard times but [...]

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How to fail and why it’s important (Deakin University occasional address)

April 24th, 2013 57 Comments

  I was asked to give a commencement address at Deakin University today. For various reasons (mainly because i’ve never actually finished Uni myself) it felt like kind of a big deal to me. What follows below is my notes of more or less what i said. I kind of winged it in person… Deputy [...]

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Four years on: Renew Newcastle’s video pitch to property owners

January 7th, 2013 15 Comments

I’m really posting this here mainly because i just realised that i never have. This video is a pitch from Renew Newcastle to local property owners that was released a few months ago. It does a great job of capturing the energy and vitality of what we’ve been doing there. On current count we are [...]

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Help! Looking for inspiring examples of #MakerPlaces

December 30th, 2012 17 Comments

 Studio Melt — A Renew Newcastle project Help! I’m looking for interesting examples of Maker Places from around the world. Over the last few months, i’ve been doing some extensive research and note taking for a book that explores the idea of what i’m calling Maker Places. The book builds on the work of Renew [...]

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Iterative cities … or why the activity is more important than the act…

December 5th, 2012 19 Comments

Of late much my work has been with cities, towns and communities independently and latterly through Renew Australia. A lot of it involves taking the lessons learnt through Renew Newcastle and attempting to apply them in other communities and contexts. It also involves a lot of training up, talking to, working with and simply observing [...]

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Makers and Places: from creation to consumption (and back again)

December 3rd, 2012 11 Comments

This is the video of a recent talk i gave as part of TEDx Moreton Bay. It’s really a balloon floating exercise as part of a larger argument than i will be running a bit in the not too distant future: that we are witnessing something of a cyclical turn from places largely of consumption [...]

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The Design Files loves Newcastle

May 9th, 2012 No Comments

  Melbourne based design blog The Design Files recently spent a week in Newcastle enabled by the outstandingly awesome Siobhan Curran… NEWCASTLE.  It is AWESOME.  I won’t hear a bad word said about it.  Totally and truly I am 100% cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die in love with the place. Originally settled as an industrious coal mining town, Newcastle [...]

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Brickstarter interview with Dan Hill

May 8th, 2012 1 Comment

I recently did an interview with Dan Hill of City of Sound, Helsinki Design Lab and everything else fame. Well, i say “an interview” but really it was more of a conversation where he took notes and ended up writing it up later. As a result i found it a lot more interest to read [...]

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Upcoming talks in Cardiff, Helsinki and Rotterdam in May

May 5th, 2012 No Comments

Renew Newcastle’s Make Space (photo by Simone Sheridan) Just a quick heads up that i’m heading to Europe over the next few weeks and will be doing talks about Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia in Helsinki, Cardiff and Rotterdam. Very quick details below… Helsinki Time and details TBC Friday 18th of May 2012 Event will be [...]

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