QUT: Co-design of a future health education and research precinct

In 2020 I was part of a design team including Leah Heiss, Olivia Hamilton, Marius Foley, and Olga Kokshagina, engaged by two architectural firms, to develop and deliver an online co-design process to understand the research, teaching and engagement opportunities afforded by a new health precinct. Our engagement as part of the generative stages of a larger architectural design project was to bring together 32 stakeholders to better understand emerging practices that would shape the design of a health precinct targeted for 2025 and beyond. This took online using a combination of Zoom and MIRO (see Tactile Tools) as it was the early days of the pandemic. Through this process, we developed a vision for the precinct together with academics, leadership, and researchers, and created an architect’s ‘functional brief’ through a participatory process that would enable stakeholders to identify the future practices that would shape the precinct. The research component of this work can be read in a publication Heiss, L., Hamilton, O., Coombs, G., De Souza, R., Kokshagina, O., Foley, M. (2022). Mutuality as a Foundation for Co-designing Health Futures. In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (eds) [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore. In it, we explore how haptic and tactile media were used in an online space and how these approaches might foster empathy and interdisciplinary understanding amongst participants. We grounded the development and the delivery of the workshop in the values of mutuality (also see Olivia Hamilton’s PhD work).