Indonesian Design Emerging

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has an ongoing project with communities and organisations Magno Design (Temangung) and Sapu Upcycle Collective (Salatiga) in Indonesia. This exhibition is curated by Alexandra Crosby (UTS). The project brings together Indonesian and Australian designers, design writers, design teachers and design thinkers to work on sustainable futures. The exhibition features designs that upcycle and reuse and also celebrate Indonesian culture and creativity. Also included are banners created by artists and designers for Festival Mata Air 2016 (Indonesia) with a focus on saving important waterways. During 2016, the Peacock Gallery has had a focus on ‘gardens’ and this exhibition recalls the remediation of the area along the Duck River that had become an industrial wasteland and a rubbish tip by the 1960s, and that became the Auburn Botanic Gardens in the 1970s. The public program at the gallery also includes activities in collaboration with Council’s Sustainability team during National Recycling Week (7-13 November)

Festivals in Java : localising cultural activism and environmental politics, 2005-2010

University of Technology, Sydney. Institute for International Studies.This thesis looks at environmentalism in Central Java, Indonesia, over the years 2005- 2010. Compared to the New Order that ended in 1998, this era has been characterised by greater cultural openness and political freedom. Activists have sought, found and invented new cultural spaces to agitate for change. This thesis takes two examples of this cultural activism. The first, the Forest Art Festival, organised by the group anakseribupulau (children of a thousand islands), was held only once, in 2006, on the edge of the forest in the town of Randublatung. The second, Festival Mata Air (Festival of Water), was organised by the group Tanam Untuk Kehidupan (Planting for Life) and held at a number of freshwater springs in Salatiga in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Festivals like these bypass colonially constructed, nationally endorsed, and globally expected modes of cultural production by working inside neighbourhoods using local methods. They exploit sites of friction between local, national and global cultural flows. I examine these festivals using the framework of a localised version of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque that incorporates a number of untranslatable local concepts and pushes and pulls at the universals that shape readings of local culture. An analysis of festivals within this framework reveals that they do more than express and exhibit culture. Festivals and the collectives that create them remix local genealogies, challenge homogenising cultural theories, and localise new technologies and aesthetics. In order to come to terms with the significance of the carnivalesque in Java new combinations of cultural theories are explored within this thesis. The features of a localised form of carnivalesque are drawn out of the festivals themselves as I examine the ways activists describe their work; the ways they interpret the globally-circulating concepts such as environmentalism; the ways they remix local rituals, stories, and images; the collaborative artworks they generate; and their localised uses of digital technologies

Listening to student voices through scenario design: Aligning learning.futures

This paper explores the preferred learning futures of students at the University of Technology Sydney and the alignments of students’ preferred futures with policy changes. The aim of the paper is to describe a different approach to listening to students’ voices and illuminate some possible ways in which the student voice can influence the implementation of higher education learning policies, with the aim of ultimately improving student learning experiences into the future. Students’ preferred futures were explored through a methodology of rapidly formulated collaborative scenario design, then coded thematically using open coding. Broad themes related to the changing context, learning environments, and independent learning, with students seeing ideal learning in higher education being a combination of personal, social and connected experiences. In order to offer a student perspective that is of use to policymakers, we discuss these preferred futures in relation to the University of Technology Sydney’s ‘learning.futures’ approach, which focuses on changing the way that learning happens in the university

Can Open Mean Terbuka? Negotiating Licenses for Indonesian Video Activism

Since the fall of Suhartos New Order regime in Indonesia, space has been opened up for the emergence and development of new practices of media production and distribution, such as the use of video for social change. As access to the technology for producing, distributing and watching video becomes increasingly democratised in Indonesia over this period, a spectrum of approaches to licensing are developing in response to ideology as well as economic impetus. These include the full adherence to the global norms of intellectual property rights, market-driven piracy, politically based rejection of any restrictions, and a burgeoning interest in Creative Commons.While Indonesia hosts one of the most enthusiastic cultures of digital sharing, this article argues that there is not yet a solution for the issues of copyright management that fits the Indonesian context. We examine the work of several groups who are currently active in producing social and environmental video in the archipelago. These include VideoBattle, Forum Lenteng, and the EngageMedia network

Design Microprotests

This essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design. While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach. In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”. We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done. In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future

Topsy\u27s in town

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/4074/thumbnail.jp

Gang re:Publik, Indonesia-Australia creative adventures

Gang re:Publik is a collection of original creative writings and images focusing on exchange and collaboration between Indonesia and Australia. The research for this book was undertaken during the Gang Festival, an artist-led initiative celebrating the deep links between Indonesian and Australian community arts. I edited and art directed the book, wrote an essay on the Jakarta artist group ruangrupa, conducted a series of interviews and contributed photographs. Gang Festival took as its theme the Indonesian word for alleyway. It straddled a dual reference to small roads and particular social groupings; referring to the space between more permanent and conventional roads and roles. In Indonesian communities, `gang, forms a critical artery in Kampung (neighbourhood) culture, where local trade and communities thrive in close proximity to one another. Gangs also evoke images of crevices, margins, and a rich density of peripheral culture. Gang Festival formed part of my PhD field work on cross-cultural collaboration between artists and designers who situate their work on the margins of commercial creative practice in Australia and Indonesia. http://asianozstudiesnews.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/new-anthology-gang-republik-indonesia.htm

C2O and Frontyard: hacking the archives to design community spaces in Surabaya and Sydney

© 2019, Luke Bacon, Kathleen Azali, Alexandra Lara Crosby and Benjamin Forster. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify shared themes and concerns of two local and critical archives by comparing their design and day-to-day practice. Design/methodology/approach: The action research has drawn on the experience of collaboration between a Sydney-based community space (Frontyard) and the Surabaya-based co-working community (C2O) over one year. Each space houses a small physical library of books, which is the focus of this analysis. Findings: Hacking has emerged as a key value of both archives. A hacking approach has shaped the design of each space and the organisation each archive. Hacking frames the analysis of each collection in this study. Practical implications: Pragmatic and political understanding of such archives have implications for better quality and more authentic exchange between the communities that make use of these libraries in Indonesia and Australia. Originality/value: While some work on local critical archives has been done in Indonesia and Australia, no research to date has made specific comparisons with the aim of sharing knowledge. Because these archives are often temporary and ephemeral, documenting the work that goes into them, and their practitioners’ perspectives, is urgent, making possible shared knowledge that can inform the ways communities make decisions about their own heritage

Increasing condom use in heterosexual men: development of a theory-based interactive digital intervention

Increasing condom use to prevent sexually transmitted infections is a key public health goal. Interventions are more likely to be effective if they are theory- and evidence-based. The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) provides a framework for intervention development. To provide an example of how the BCW was used to develop an intervention to increase condom use in heterosexual men (the MenSS website), the steps of the BCW intervention development process were followed, incorporating evidence from the research literature and views of experts and the target population. Capability (e.g. knowledge) and motivation (e.g. beliefs about pleasure) were identified as important targets of the intervention. We devised ways to address each intervention target, including selecting interactive features and behaviour change techniques. The BCW provides a useful framework for integrating sources of evidence to inform intervention content and deciding which influences on behaviour to target