For most filmmakers, 12 months is a short timeline to pitch, organize and produce a five-episode documentary series shot across three cities. But for director Colin Waugh and the team at Sticks and Stones, an Edmonton-based creative agency and production company, 12 months is all they had to bring On Design to national audiences.
Each 15-minute episode of the docuseries profiles a Canadian industrial design team working in fields like commercial furniture, lighting and home goods. The result is a behind-the-scenes look at how some of Canada’s avant-garde furniture and designer goods get made.
Sticks and Stones pitched the idea for the series to CBC in March of 2024, inspired in part by the abundance of great industrial design work across the country. They got the official go ahead in October that same year, on the condition that they turn the project around in five months, just one year after their initial email. “We have a lot of really talented people who can cover essentially all the steps of the process of (filmmaking),” Waugh says.
We talked to Waugh about the series, now streaming on CBC Gem, and about the surprising commonalities between Edmonton’s filmmakers and designers.
Edify: How did you determine who would be featured in the series?
Colin Waugh: We presented a list of designers from across Canada that we thought could tell a great story and were doing work that we all admired. But we also had to consider how we could connect with them within our short timeline. We turned to Danny Ross, an Edmonton design consultant, for help connecting with designers around Canada that we didn’t personally know. It was really awesome having him on board because he could talk to those designers and say, “Hey, you can trust these guys. They’re gonna put something cool together.” (Editors’ note: Danny Ross also serves as an Edify contributing editor for fashion and design.)
Edify: What was your relationship to industrial design before the project started?
Waugh: There are so many amazing industrial designers in Edmonton — some are good friends — but I think everyone has some kind of relationship with industrial design, whether they know it or not, because unlike other forms of art, it’s in the objects all around us.
We’d also just finished a documentary about architecture — about the Arthur Erickson house out by the Botanical Gardens — and that project went from a microstory about a house outside of Edmonton to something getting programmed at film festivals around the world. It made us quickly realize how ferocious the appetite was for art and design stories. As a close relative to architecture, industrial design is a field where you can document the process within a short period of time.
Edify: Edmonton is well represented in the series. Was it important to you to see the city represented in that way?
Waugh: Absolutely — especially for someone like Geof Lilge, who is a humble person by nature. But when you start peeling back layers of his story — where his chairs have shown up, and the impact he’s had on the global community — you realize there’s a really cool story there to tell. Seeing how many of those stories were in Edmonton, we felt that it wasn’t that we were adding Edmonton stories to a Canadian scope because Edmonton designers were already working at a national level.
Edify: In thinking about Edmonton designers — I wondered if, as a filmmaker, you felt a sort of a kinship with them as creatives that live in the city that are working to get things made.
Waugh: There’s an outlook shared by people from cities like ours that you don’t appreciate until you’re in larger markets and meet people who don’t share it. It’s an understanding that, if you want to move a project forward, you have to wear many hats, say yes to a lot of things. If there’s a hurdle, you’re jumping in to try and solve it. It’s something that shows up in a strong way in Edmonton, where people kind of just make stuff happen.
I would say filmmaking and industrial design are very similar in that manner. No one handed these designers their opportunities. They’ve just had to brute force them up the hill until they garnered international attention. And that’s something that we obviously try to do in our work as well.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
All five episodes of ‘On Design’ are now streaming on CBC Gem.
