What would Australian design look like if Country were treated as an active participant in the act of designing?

Alison Page and Paul Memmott approach Aboriginal design as it should, exploring the enormously developed system of relationships between people, place, materials, movement, ceremony and responsibility. Moving through architecture, engineered structures, tools, settlement patterns and practices of making, Design: Building on Country shows how Indigenous design knowledge has been refined through thousands of years of observation and use. There is work on fish traps responding to water systems, shelters responding to climate and mobility, objects whose forms emerge from social as much as practical function, amongst so much more. The question threading it all together, is whether Australian design can actually become responsive to the Country it occupies, rather than repeatedly imposing itself upon it.

Part of the excellent First Knowledges series, edited by Margo Neale, and a particularly accessible entry point into thinking about architecture, sustainability and design outside the imported assumptions that usually organise those fields. 

First edition, Thames & Hudson Australia, 2021. Paperback. Illustrated throughout. First Knowledges series, Volume 2; edited by Margo Neale.