Participation in Action

The power of participation in co-realising unique ideas for places, spaces and programs highlights how design and creative practices enable us to come together to make decisions and shape our future. To share insights into such ways of working, we curated a showcase of photography, film and drawing to shine a light on four projects developed in collaboration with diverse communities across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024. The practitioners and researchers that co-authored these projects, including us, experiment with various participatory methods and socially engaged creative practices, prioritising process as much as outcome. In doing this, relationships, initiatives and time become the project, with built or spatial outcomes expressing only one aspect of a larger sum of parts. These highly relational ways of working highlight a shift in ways of thinking about how conceptions of built and spatial environments can foreground inclusion, self-determination and positive social change, something we are keenly invested in, in every project we do!

The exhibition was conceived on the unceded lands of the Kulin nation, with content prepared across the Traditional lands of the Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr, Yaegl, Gunai/Kurnai and Kardu Diminin peoples, and of Iwi Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. We acknowledge Indigenous connection to creative practice and pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging.