Educational Awareness Display at Main Beach Park, Byron Bay

The Educational Awareness Display at Main Beach Park, Byron Bay, stems from nearly a decade of Positive Change for Marine Life (PCFML) addressing marine debris, its impacts, and causes. Since 2012, PCMFL has collected over 500,000 individual items such as alcohol and beverage bottles, cigarette butts, food wrappers and other forms of litter from a 200m transect of Main Beach. These discarded items negatively impact Byron Bay's marine park, home to critically endangered species such as the grey nurse shark, three species of oceanic turtles, resident bottlenose dolphins, and migrating seabirds.

The display seeks to educate visitors on the impacts of littering on the local marine life and was developed in partnership with the traditional owners of Byron Bay, the Arakwal corporation, the Byron Shire Council, and PCFML and serves as a memorial to the late Ian Harrison, the local designer behind the display concept.

As the design lead, I developed and reinterpreted the initial design intent for functional and aesthetic requirements. During design development, the use of virtual reality (VR) tools helped me consider scale, proportion, and graphics layout. Moreover, VR gave me a better appreciation for how the general public would view the sign in context, which can be difficult to decipher from a 2D CAD screen.

In addition, the design brief called for locally sourced and recycled materials and solar-powered display lighting to illuminate the incorporated Arakwal artwork by Kaitlyn Clark. The project was successfully unveiled at Main Beach on 23 February 2021.

All images courtesy of PCFML 2021.