A CLIMACTIC TURNING POINT IN FIRST NATION HISTORY | 2023
Collaborating with Country has never been more relevant and crucial to design. Co-designing with Country involves a process of learning and unlearning, and redefining outdated ways of thinking. First Nation perspectives can invite people to engage with Country and place on a multi-dimensional level. I’ve currently got about ten projects on the go and […]
Working with place
Working with Country really taps into people’s need to connect to enduring stories, our need for tradition and ceremony. If you look at the broader cultural landscape there are spiritual and potent stories in every place that are very unique, which is a really interesting proposition for urban designers because the world is getting very […]
The new Indigenous Institute for Designing with Country at UTS
The Indigenous Institute For Design with Country is a cross-disciplinary design lab specialising in Country-centred design thinking in the real world, bringing together designers, land management experts, community leaders, and thinkers from all backgrounds and disciplines to look at storytelling and placemaking. We’re going back to a First Nations concept of storytelling, which is about […]
Why putting Indigenous storytelling at the heart of what we do is good for Australia
Australian design is 65,000 years old. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders didn’t have the written word. Everything was encoded in stories which were embedded in the land in geographic locations and in objects around us — painted onto bodies, danced, and sung. It was a multi-artform way of recording information. This allowed us to remember […]
A NEW AUSTRALIAN DESIGN
In the Dreaming when the earth was soft, the land was occupied by Ancestral beings. They were part animal, plant and human and they travelled up through the earth and across it, shaping the land and leaving behind them tracks of knowledges. This created a network of connected sites and totemic relationships between plants, animals […]
