Reimagining co-design on Country as a relational and transformational practice

ABSTRACT

Undertaking participatory work with Indigenous people requires a reflexive and critical reimagining of how non-Indigenous design researchers engage with place. This paper draws upon reflexive learnings from a co-design education programme with young adults from Ntaria, Western Arrarnta Country in the Central Desert of Australia. Co-designing with Ntaria youth involved deeper questioning of the dynamics of participation, catalysing a change of pace and a shift from engaging as a Design Researcher and Educator to a person open to different ways of relating. This embodied transformation required leaning into uncertainty and discomfort as a new practice of waiting and becoming relational, attuned to the temporal rhythms of people and ‘Country’. While the stories are highly personal and contextually specific, the paper aims to inspire others to reflect and question alternative ways of being a design researcher. By shifting away from de-personalised accounts of research that emphasises roles, skills, processes, and methodologies, this paper reimagines co-design as co-ontological ways of becoming, which troubles research traditions of replicability and generalisability. For co-design to be reimagined this way, we argue the significance of onto-epistemes that are beyond dominant research orthodoxies to respect and embrace pluriversal ways of participating, learning, and teaching design.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal onto-episteme
• waiting
• participation
• ontology
• decolonising

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers and editors for their assistance in the paper. Nicola is honoured and thankful to the Ntaria young adults, school, and community for letting her do this work on Western Arrarnta Country and their time, support, contributions and permission to enable, do and share the work we draw upon.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Arrernte (pronounced as ‘Ah–runda’) is commonly used in official and academic writings (Kral 2000). However, there is a growing desire among the Western Arrarnta community to spell Arrarnta and not Arrernte, which we follow in this paper.

2. The accounts shared here are Nicola’s experience, so the worldviews of the second author (Yoko) are not explained in the paper, but they have been written elsewhere (see Akama 2021).