Designing our future homes in an urban landscape

Claire Bradley has worked in the magazine industry for 18 years and has worked across all three major publishing houses.

She began on gardening title Your Garden, where she worked as editorial coordinator, picture researcher, writer and chief sub editor. She went on to freelance for a slew of weekly and monthly women’s brands, including Cosmopolitan, Woman’s Day and NW.

In 2007, Claire started at sunday magazine and over the following seven years wrote, commissioned and edited all manner of features spanning a broad topic area. From music and celebrity to experiential pieces, to travel, food and real-life. Working as managing editor, associate editor and eventually editor for 12 months.

Seconded from sunday to work on a digital project within the News Corp daily metro news sites gave her a deeper and fundamental insight into the imperatives print products face to ensure a modern brand has a multi-platform offering and position.

Claire excels at rebranding and repositioning niche titles and is a thoroughly modern version of a multifaceted editor. In 2012, she relaunched Inside Out taking it from a print product to a multiplatform brand, then the following year took on Gardening Australia and relaunched it in 2014. She was the first editor in Australia to create a homes desk that capitalized on shared resources and production process.

In 2016, Claire stepped into her current role as associate publisher for the Homes category in NewsLifeMedia, where she works across Vogue Living, Country Style, HomeLife brands, in addition to continuing to head up Inside Out.

In her career she strives to be available as a mentor and role model, actively working to bring teams together that could benefit from an ‘ecology’ approach. She values EQ, and feels her understanding of working with people’s strengths will help her create functioning healthy teams.

Dr Thea Brejzek is professor for Spatial Theory at the University of Technology Sydney, director of the Interior Architecture Program in the School of Design at UTS, and co-director of the Joint PhD program ‘Critical Spatial Thinking: Performative Practices and Narrative Spaces in Design’ in collaboration with TU Berlin.

She has a background in opera stage directing and theatre studies. From 2007 to 2012 she was a professor of Scenorgraphy at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Thea publishes and lectures widely on the history and theory of scenography and performative environments with a particular interest in transdisciplinary practices and the politics of space in performance, and in 2011, was the founding curator for Theory at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space (PQ).

Thea Brejzek is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Bauhaus Dessau and associate editor of the Routledge Journal, Theatre and Performance Design. She has been visiting professor at Bartlett School of Architecture, is a research fellow at TU Berlin and in 2017 has been awarded a Bogliasco Foundation Research Fellowship.

Chris Johnson is the CEO of Urban Taskforce Australia, an organisation that represents the property industry. In this role Chris has produced research papers on the structure of local government in NSW and publications on the future of our cities. He worked closely with local government as executive director in the NSW Department of Planning in developing the Housing Code, plans for regional cities and urban renewal generally. Before this he was NSW Government architect for 10 years, a member of the Central Sydney Planning Committee, the Heritage Council of NSW and many government committees. Chris has written or edited over a dozen books on urban planning, architecture and cities. He has been adjunct professor at three Sydney universities and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012.

Formally the deputy country manager for IKEA in Russia, Mr Gardberg brings 32 years of international IKEA experience to the expanding IKEA business in Australia.

While on the executive team at IKEA Russia he was responsible for the businesses sustainability strategy, eCommerce rollout, distribution integration, food business and the retail operations for the 14 stores across the country. 

Prior to this, his career has seen him in leadership positions across the IKEA retail, supply chain and product development businesses.