Design and Cultural Identity
Creators: name: Jansen, Trent
Publisher: name: UNSW Sydney
Year: 2020

description: How deeply do we understand design? What do objects say about our history, context, and place? In this year of change and reflection, we may find ourselves examining the narratives that have shaped our cultural identity. At our next virtual Learn@Lunch, leading designer and UNSW Art &amp; Design lecturer, Dr Trent Jansen, will explore his unique approach to conceptual design, known in his studio as Design Anthropology. Through his work, Dr Jansen collaborates with people across different cultures to embody their values, ideas, and attitudes in single artefacts. Hosted by Professor Ross Harley, Dean UNSW Art &amp; Design, this talk will explore Dr Jansen’s award-winning approach to collaborative design and the impact it can have on our national culture and consciousness. Australian designers talk about Australian design, but what is Australian design? How might an Australian designer purposefully embody Australian values in artefacts? According to Jules D Prown, the artefacts that we produce are the physical embodiment of our ‘values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions’. I am interested in the subjectivity of our interpretation of artefacts and texts, and see this interpretation as an integral part of finding meaning in material culture. I believe that we can only identify the cultural values embodied in artefacts through the lens of our own experiences, understandings, values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions. I am not interested in reading material culture, as Prown and his colleagues, but I am interested in Prown’s theory that the artefacts we design and make are the physical embodiment of our culture. Because, if it is possible to design and/or make an artefact that embodies my values without me knowing it, it may too be possible to purposefully design an artefact that exhibits culturally specific characteristics – an embodiment of the cultural characteristics that I choose as influences. This is the basis of my Design Anthropology practice. This research culminated in 2017 in a project where I was able to explore the potential for creature myths to form contemporary cross-cultural bonds, while working with a group of artists and makers of Indigenous Australian descent in the Kimberley region of WA. I was also keen to continue exploring an idea that was shared with me some years earlier by Tasmanian Aboriginal scholar and member of the National Museum of Australia’s Indigenous Reference Group, Greg Lehman. Lehman says that it is no longer acceptable for non-Indigenous Australians to ‘place Aboriginal culture on a shelf, afraid to touch it’. This type of inaction only reinforces the divide that exists between these two cultures. Lehman says that it is crucial for non-Indigenous Australians from all creative backgrounds – musicians, artists, designers, etc. – to ‘respectfully take Aboriginal culture into their own expressions of culture, and communicate these ideas to new audiences’. This type of creative pursuit can begin to break down some of the barriers that exist between these two communities.  Lehman’s ideas rang true for me, as I was completely ignorant of Indigenous Australian cultures until enrolling in Aboriginal Studies as a subject for my HSC, too many years ago. I was again given the great privilege of learning more during an extended period in Central Australia in my late-twenties. Through serendipity I had come to learn some of the great richness and beauty of those Indigenous Australian cultures I had connected with, but so many Australians will never have that privilege, and as Lehman says, this is what reinforces cultural barriers. I remain dedicated to working respectfully with Indigenous Australian artists, makers and story tellers, sharing those stories that individuals and communities want to tell, so that these narratives might feature more prominently in mainstream Australian mythology – the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
description: UNSW Learn @ Lunch; Remote; 2020-07-08 - 2020-07-08