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2026 Craft + Design Canberra Festival Program

Performance, Highlight Robert Potter Performance, Highlight Robert Potter

ALTER – a double bill of Design, Dance, Disability and Dissent

6 + 7 November 2026 | Belconnen Arts Centre

Design and dance collide in a double-bill exploring the interplay between body, identity and cross-cultural exchange. ALTER is an Austral/Asian collaboration presented by dancers living with and without disability - offering a beautiful hybrid of ephemeral visual art and dance, illustrating the power of dissent through lived and imagined realities.  

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Symposium, Highlight Robert Potter Symposium, Highlight Robert Potter

Are we measuring Canberra all wrong?

6 November 2026 | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

In line with the Craft + Design Canberra Festival theme of Dissent, this conversation asks whether we are measuring the things that matter most. As Canberra grows and changes, are we optimising for the metrics that are easier to count, or for the things that make our city a better place to live? This discussion will explore how the measures we choose influence the places we create, and whether it is time to broaden the way we define success. 

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Tour, Highlight Robert Potter Tour, Highlight Robert Potter

Canberra Open Homes

9 – 15 November 2026 | Across Canberra

Explore Canberra's award-winning Architecture with new landmark buildings and ingenious sustainable residences through the Australian Institute of Architecture's ACT Chapter tour program. 

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Exhibition, Free, Highlight Robert Potter Exhibition, Free, Highlight Robert Potter

Delightly

5 – 25 November 2026  | Canberra Glassworks

Delightly revives endangered scientific glassblowing skills, transforming salvaged laboratory glass into plasma-illuminated vessels. Harriet Schwarzrock creates objects whose luminous behaviour shifts with viewer proximity, taking science out of the museum. Darkened, subtly interactive installations offer multi-sensory wonder, merging curiosity with playful public engagement in glass and light. 

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Talk, Free Robert Potter Talk, Free Robert Potter

Designing Currency

6 November 2026 | Royal Australian Mint

2026 marks the 60th anniversary of Decimal Currency, designed by Australian industrial designer Stuart Devlin and minted here in Canberra at the Royal Australian Mint. To mark the year, the Mint presents an in-conversation event with coin designers Neve Foxcroft and Lydia Ashe.

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Talk, Free Robert Potter Talk, Free Robert Potter

Dissent: Opposition/Proposition 

10 November 2026 | Reconciliation Place

Presented by Architectus in partnership with SONA and EmAGN, Dissent: Opposition/Proposition brings together emerging thought leaders from architecture, urban design and adjacent fields to interrogate the role of sanctioned and unsanctioned design in the city and explore how opposition can become a proposition for change. 

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Exhibition, Free, Highlight Robert Potter Exhibition, Free, Highlight Robert Potter

Raw and Refined

5 – 22 November 2026 | Canberra Airport

Raw and Refined is an exhibition of new work by established contemporary jeweller Phoebe Porter exploring the dualities of raw and worked, natural and cultural, and material and meaning. The project explores refinement both as an artistic act, distilling ideas and forms to their essence, and as a material process in which raw elements are transformed to become workable.

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