Design: Building on Country | Thames & Hudson | 2019
Aboriginal design is of a distinctly cultural nature, based in the Dreaming and in ancient practices grounded in Country. It is visible in the aerodynamic boomerang, the ingenious design of fish traps and the precise layouts of community settlements that strengthen social cohesion. Alison Page and Paul Memmott show how these design principles of sophisticated […]
On creative solutionsÂ
Before he died Paul Boero was working on Indigenous housing as an architect—he went into remote communities and looked at the issue of trachoma and worked out it was a house design issue—the way that houses were designed let all the dust came in. There were also issues with?? . So he made a few […]
On working with AI
I guess we would need an AI ‘Dreaming’ … which means carefully considering what the dangers are and then writing a new Dreaming story that would weight everything up so that AI doesn’t run rampant. I mean, there’s a Dreaming for everything. It’s about being considered in your decision making … that’s what good design […]
On 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 […]
On the new Indigenous Institute for Designing with Country at UTSÂ
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 […]
On why working across disciplines is essential
Designing with Country is really about that dialogue between designers and architects and landscape architects and traditional owners so that you can bring together the best of traditional knowledges and Western technology to create the best cities in the world, the best places in the world that speak to us the way our country did […]
On why putting Indigenous storytelling at the heart of what we do is good for AustraliaÂ
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 the vast […]
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 […]
String Theory Shop | Museum of Contemporary Art | date
Do we even have any images? Alison Page was invited to create a ‘pop up’ shop as part of the String Theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art exhibition, created by Glenn Barkley at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition brought together over 30 different artist group from around the country. Incorporating both sustainability and […]
IBA Office Fitout | Canberra | DATE?
The National Aboriginal Design Agency (NADA), headed up by Alison Page, was asked to supply the cultural design theme for the Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) office fit out in Canberra ACT. The construction documentation was completed by architectural consultants PVH. NADA were engaged to oversee and assist with appropriate cultural design and placement of Aboriginal art […]