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 encoding the library, the Dreaming of our ecological and cultural data, as well as our law—our social laws, our science, our medicine. It’ll be design education based on the mnemonic system of song lines.
The Institute will provide an opportunity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to come and learn about that system of storytelling. We’re looking to have the highest cohort of Indigenous students across UTS. You want to genuinely create pathways for these kids to be active, employed members of our community. The demand is incredible. Design can be an act of power because design is problem solving. And First Nations people have a lot of problems. So imagine if they/we? were solving their/our own problems, imagine if the built environment became the voice for our Culture and our values … which are values that are good for everyone. Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture is Australia’s great cultural inheritance.
The Institute will be a first of its kind in Australia and it’s an opportunity for UTS to be ahead of the curve in a burgeoning industry that is being fuelled by the NSW Government Architects Connecting with Country Planning Framework and The National Standard of Competency for Architects (NSCA) 2021, introducing “the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People’s ongoing connection and custodianship of Country”. We need to amplify the contributions of Indigenous Knowledge across the creative disciplines and industries. The potential amalgamation of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) will place the Indigenous Institute for Designing with Country at an important strategic position for the new Faculty. It’ll give us the opportunity to design with story.