Below lists a short collection of research completed and conferences presented.
Published Work
Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design: questions of access, engagement and creative experience
Vernon Press, 2022
‘Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design’ is premised on a belief in the importance of participatory practices in finding creative solutions to the plethora of problems we face today. It argues that engaging professions with the public in mutual exploration, analysis, and creative thinking is essential. It not only ensures better quality products, places, services, and a greater sense of civic agency but also facilitates fuller access to them and the life opportunities they can unleash.
How do designed objects and environments affect wellness, creativity, learning, and a sense of belonging? How do products and services affect everyday experience and attitudes towards issues such as sustainability? How does giving people a creative voice in their own education, services, and built environments open up their potential and strengthen identity and civic agency? Addressing these questions requires a rethinking of relations between people, objects, and environments; it demands attention to space, place, and services.
This book offers a uniquely varied perspective of the myriad ways in which participatory practices operate across disciplines and how they impact the worlds and communities we create and inhabit.
Academic Research & Projects
DL2 | Ascilite Research Grant
Faculty Assessment Practices in Response to COVID-19: opportunities for innovative futures
University of Melbourne, 2022 | Lead Researcher: Kate Coleman
Examined faculty assessment practices in response to COVID-19 and
identified what enabled or constrained digital learning. Engaged with
researchers to enact Design Based Research methods in future execution.
Inclusive Design Program (IDP) Product Brief
Swinburne University of Technology, 2022 | Lead Researchers: Jane Connory, Shivani Tyagi
Created a third-year industrial design studio brief that incorporates HCD
methodologies for inclusive re-design of period products.
Helping to destigmatise the use of period products for trans, masculine presenting, non-binary and gender diverse (TMNG) consumers through an inclusive communication design framework (Jane Connory & Shivani Tyagi 2024)
Climate Action Audit
Climate Crisis and Sustainability Education: Pilot Curriculum Review for MADA
Monash University, 2021 | Primary Investigator: A.Prof Peter Graham
Investigated current approaches to sustainability education and identified
opportunities for improvement. Used NVivo to create a thematic analysis,
conducted interviews with staff, and collated insights for internal report.
Conferences
February 2021
Real-time co-analysis: Probing lived experiences and analysing material data (Co-convener: Yi Zhang)
Invited creative practitioners who work with non-numerical data (visual/material/embodied/intuitive, etc.) as well as those who are interested in new ways to integrate co-analysis activities into their practice.
October 2020
Public Pedagogies of Location, PPI Conference 2020 // Online Seminar
Narrative Panoramas: surfacing tacit knowledge through material translation and co-analysis of lived experiences
Explored how to better understand how digital ecologies affect and reflect our lived experiences through reflective making and storytelling.
August 2020
Narrative Dioramas: Capturing tacit knowledge generated through reflexive language of lived experiences
This workshop investigated how participants can analytically engage with a lived experience through scaffolded making activities.
January 2020
Narrative Dioramas: Capturing new knowledge generated through storymaking within co-design activities
Presented PhD research that investigated how variations of performance, forms, and future imaginaries emerge in generative making methods, how they are shared through stories within workshops, and how best to analyse story data.
March 2019
Melbourne Design Week Workshop
Re-Imagining Data in Creative Practice
Invited participants to reflect on different types of data in their own practice, and examine the design decisions and activities that make that data known. The workshop interrogated and transformed preconceptions about what data might look like, feel like, and ways it might deepen one’s own practice.
Masters Publication
How can design mitigate the effects of chronic stress among high school students?
This Is Water, examined chronic stress on high school students and what design can do to help mitigate the psychological and physiological effects of that stress. Reid Henkel and I partnered with The Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management, to create a ten week program that uses Reflective Making (form-giving & storytelling) techniques to increase students’ awareness about the effects of their stress (what it does, says, feels, and thinks) on both themselves and others in their lives. By engaging students in conversations with their stress they will be better equipped to thrive in this world because if you can change the way you see your stress you can change the stress you see.
Download a PDF version of the thesis book here.
Art Direction
What would it take to forget what we know, to abandon or rearrange the way in which we insist upon seeing the world? The proposed publication, Innocent Eye, aims to guide its readers to see their creative world in a new way.
Anais Nin wrote “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Perhaps it is possible to regain some sense of wonder. Cultivating an innocent eye is like learning to balance, simple yet elusive. Instructions help but ultimately over thinking it can backfire. Sometimes found by losing it, it is impossible to locate without lifting one foot. An innocent eye takes practice too, but can only be perfected by changing your focus.
The following comps are designed for proposal purposes only and are not intended for publication or sale. All images are pending permission or purchase. Please do not copy or distribute. The design and copy included in the sample are copyrighted by Jennifer Griffin.
