Diverse Design Perspectives at Melbourne Design Week 2021
How can design transcend borders in a time without travel? Tash Miles and Manami Ray discuss their upcoming talk ‘Designing Change Through Cross-Cultural Collaboration’ at Melbourne Design Week 2021
A global pandemic is a sure-fire way to disrupt regularly scheduled programming — particularly in Asia Pacific, a region known for easily accommodating travel for both work and leisure. As we adjust to the limits of our current grounded reality, inventive design thinking emerges as an effective tool for dissolving cultural and geographical distance.
According to Tash Miles, strategic communications designer at the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and Manami Ray, masters student and consultant at Capital Human, collaborative working has boundless potential to create meaningful design solutions both here and abroad. ‘As a graphic designer working in government, it’s important to me — and to us, as a country — to be creating accessible information in a way that can be understood and accessed by everyone who lives here,’ says Miles. ‘And part of that needs to be about understanding those diverse and vulnerable communities.’
Design as a pathway to building empathy feels especially timely now, as Australia, like the rest of the world, navigates an outspoken push for better representation and equality across all sectors. We see this paradigm shift toward genuine inclusivity put to work on projects that require converging skill sets from geographically and demographically diverse contributors. ‘We really need to be thinking in terms of multifaceted diversity, of gender, geographic location, culture, social status, ability and age,’ Ray says. ‘When we design a way forward, it’s for a melting pot of different perspectives and people.’
Having both studied a Masters of Design Strategy and Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology, Miles and Ray are also alumni of the university’s SUGAR Network, common creative ground they share with panellists Christine Thong of Design Factory Melbourne at Swinburne, Sushi Suzuki of the Kyoto Institute of Technology and KYOTO Design Lab, and Falk Uebernickel of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design Thinking and Innovation Research in Germany. Known as the SUGAR Global Design Innovation Network, the initiative partners masters students from universities around the globe with companies who propose real-world projects to be resolves through cross-cultural, multidisciplinary collaboration.
‘I think that in Australia, a country without land borders, we have to force ourselves out of our comfort zones and step up,’ Miles says. ‘To achieve the type of understanding that leads to new design outcomes, it takes a lot of humility, and I don’t know that many Australians are ready to completely readjust to the idea that there are wholly different ways of approaching the world.’
‘There’s an interesting term I’ve come across recently: “inculturation”, which is when you become indoctrinated to the place, culture or ecosystem that you exist in,’ Ray explains. ‘So our question, as people designing for such a mixed spectrum, is how can we avoid that bias when we’re working in a global context?’
Text / Sandra Tan
Designing Change Through Cross-Cultural Collaboration will take place as part of Melbourne Design Week, on Monday 29 March at 18:30
Read our editor-in-chief’s round up of must-see exhibitions, screenings, talks and tours at Melbourne Design Week 2021
