DETAILS
Free, no booking required
RMIT Media Portal - Building 14 Level 2 Room 13
RMIT University/Swanston St, Melbourne VIC, Australia
DATES
Thu 21 May 9am – 6pm
Fri 22 May 9am – 6pm
Fri 22 May 5 – 6pm
Panel talk
This isn’t just an exhibition. It’s a provocation.
Designers from RMIT’s Master of Design, Technology and Innovation explore design as a restorative practice: slow, accountable and built with the communities that extraction-led design has most often overlooked.
This exhibition asks: What if design wasn’t about making new things, but restoring relationships within Melbourne/Naarm’s vibrant food culture?
Using the Sociable Designer framework – rooted in trust, reciprocity and long-term engagement with community and Country – the projects respond to Melbourne’s fractured food systems. From the erased knowledge of First Nations foodways to the invisible labour of migrant growers, the works expose the cracks in industrial food systems and propose alternatives that are regenerative, decolonised and convivial.
Visitors are invited to question, tinker and engage. Conversations unfold alongside opportunities to contribute to scenarios and explore speculative works imagining a Melbourne where food systems are built on reciprocity.
This is not design as product. It’s design as a practice of repair.
The event is open Thursday 21 May and Friday 22 May, 9 am–6 pm.
On Friday 22 May at 5 pm, a panel discussion brings together lecturers and students from the program.
Design as Repair: How Restorative Practices Can Transform Systems – and Why We Must Demand More
Areli Avendaño, Reg Abos, Steph Ochona, Saskia Medd and Chloe Coelho discuss the shift from extractive design to practices grounded in reciprocity, accountability and radical transformation.
Participants include:
Apaar
Hsun-Yu Chang
Lisa Hua
Tzu-Yun Huang
Jiaying Kang
Yuzhi Lin
Kailin Liu
Zi-Yu Liu
Jiayue Ma
Pawarisa Oumkong
Ariadna Rodriguez Chaparro
Ann Simpson
Sujittra Suwattanachao
Lim Tian Yee
Yushan Wei
Grace Patricia Windarto
Yilu Wu
Jiaqi Xie
Shiwen Xu
Jamming! mentors include:
Renee Akers
Kelly Gong
Angelica Milanes
Phurnnee Mohanasunder
Akshitha Krishna Patibandla
Noorie Sheriff
Participants
Dr Areli Avendaño Franco
Areli Avendaño Franco is a Mexican designer, educator and catalyst whose work sits at the radical edges of design practice. For over sixteen years, she has challenged design’s complicity in harm and its colonial legacies, advocating for a discipline that listens deeply and acts as a facilitator, not an expert. Her practice bridges sustainability, care and repair, collaborating with communities and institutions such as Sustainability Victoria to reimagine design’s role in systemic change.Areli’s work moves between the material and the systemic – hands in the soil, eyes on the structures – that shape our world. As co-founder of Jamming! and mentor with DESIAP, she creates learning spaces that embrace failure, question extraction and amplify marginalised voices. Her practice is an invitation to think differently, demonstrating that design, when rooted in humility and hope, can transform how we see and shape the world.
Dr Regine Abos
Regine Abos is a designer, educator and researcher originally from Cebu. Over the last two decades, she has worked extensively on projects with publishers and social innovation researchers in Australia and the Asia Pacific and has consistently received accolades from the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Book Designers Association. She has previously served on the education committee of the Data Visualisation Society and the executive committee of the Australian Book Designers Association. Her research interests lie at the convergence of analogue objects and information design, examining how perspectives in data visualisation can be mapped to aspects of physical production.Reg lectures in publication design and data representation at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), and her doctoral studies focused on how playful representations of data can facilitate behaviour change at Swinburne University of Technology.
Stephanie Ochona
Stephanie Ochona (she/they) is a Filipino transdisciplinary designer and researcher based on the unceded lands of the eastern Kulin Nations.They are currently completing a PhD at RMIT on interaction design for urban biodiversity. They were previously a publication designer and illustrator at Overland Literary Journal. They are interested in multi-species and sensory collaborations, publication design and risograph printing.
Saskia Medd
Saskia is an industrial designer in Melbourne/Naarm.She is interested in exhibition design, more-than-human design, food systems, critical and speculative design, sustainable products, and design for policy change. She is also passionate about cooking, making art and competing in taekwondo.
Chloe Coehlo
Chloe Coehlo (she/they) is a designer whose creative practice engages the intricate dimensions of death, grief and design. As a death scholar, their academic pursuits are driven by a commitment to unpacking the complexities of death literacy and devising innovative strategies to enhance public understanding of this universal human experience.Currently pursuing a PhD, their research focuses on memorialisation, examining the interplay between materiality and the construction of meaning in the grieving process.