The challenges to implement digital technologies in community-based projects are exposed in a case study co-designing an indigenous Community Museum, situated in the Kelabit Highlands of Borneo, Malaysia. Over a five-year period, this co-design project consisted of field trips, community engagements, and creating a documentary film and an inaugural exhibition in the newly constructed Kelabit Museum. This article highlights the limitations of digital technologies in museum contexts. Co-designing with stakeholders resulted in the decision to take a non-digital approach to the museum development to encourage greater community agency and prevent disengagement, as it incorporated heritage values in local community developments and cultural tourism plans. The findings demonstrate that community self-determination conflicted with preconceived outcomes, resulting in a need to re-evaluate the goals of the project. Instead, the ambition of cultural heritage preservation that maintained community participation emerged as the central goal. Removing the focus on a digital solution expanded community participation, which is a finding that should be used to frame other community cultural developments.

Contemporary higher education is continually facing change and disruption across global and local educational communities. This has been exacerbated by the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic, with graduates having to demonstrate discipline-specific knowledge along with adaptability to an ever-changing employment market. To address these needs, the authors advocate a focus on professional transitions by taking advantage of the eportfolio and reframing the digital showcase tool as a curated digital narrative for any discipline. Taking a detailed focus on the case study example of the Verandah Journal , this article demonstrates how one practice-based project can be adaptively framed for diverse job opportunities and can serve as the foundation for a portfolio career. The authors conclude that a flexible, curated demonstration of skills and knowledge creates the foundations for a graduate to narrate their professional transition in a challenging future work environment. Further research is required to expand this understanding to both graduates and prospective employers.

This paper presents a case study where participatory design practices were used to design a cultural museum and inaugural exhibition with designers from an Australian university and the Kelabit community in the Highlands of Borneo. We draw on experiences from fieldtrips, across a five-year period, investigating the exchange of expertise between participants. The findings show a shift in roles when sharing expertise throughout our participatory design process. Participants experienced a lack of clarity and a sense of discomfort while participating in the design of the museum resulting in the need to continually negotiate leadership of the project. The designers discovered their role was to facilitate intangible conversations into tangible outcomes, where participatory design tools reshaped conversations rather than designed final artefacts. We argue that when exchanging expertise across cultures in participatory design, participant roles become organic and ambiguous.

Post-industrial cities often find themselves at a crossroads as to whether to find a new identity or embrace their industrial past. In late 2017, after the closure of major manufacturing plants in the region, the Australian city of Geelong was designated a UNESCO City of Design and embraced a “Clever and Creative” strategy which acknowledged Geelong’s industrial and design past in responding to contemporary technological, demographic, and economic challenges. However, questions remain as to which versions of the past are valued by the local community and how these stories can be shared. To better understand the social value of design and manufacturing heritage in Geelong as well as to get initial feedback on how to interpret this type of heritage through novel immersive extended reality (XR) experiences, the researchers took a community-led approach. This paper reports on the results of the initial online community surveys (N = 55–137) and in-person stakeholder interviews (N = 5) with carefully selected representatives of the local government, education, heritage, tourism, and engineering sectors. The study’s outcome demonstrates the importance of design and manufacturing heritage for the local community’s identity. Moreover, this type of heritage provides a source of inspiration, learning opportunities for future creative problem-solvers, and economic opportunities through tourism. By engaging with the social value of design and manufacturing heritage, this paper argues that more effective and targeted storytelling, game-like applications, and other digital immersive experiences such as extended reality (XR) can be used to better engage with audiences.

Changing patterns of careers, from traditional through to boundaryless, have led to reconsidering student agency in transitioning from higher education to the labor market. Student agency, in the context of this chapter, requires students to synthesize disciplinary skills and knowledge of specific courses with industry-oriented work-integrated learning experiences, aligning these reflective learnings with fluid career patterns. This chapter postulates that graduates demonstrate their agency by curating and narrating their outputs and learnings to personalize their ongoing career story by clearly recognizing individual behaviors and attributes. The authors define this as digital storymaking, integrating an ePortfolio to identify the graduate's capacity to engage with rapidly changing employability requirements imaginatively. If employers accept digital storymaking as part of a demonstration of capacity, they may identify a more adaptive graduate, able to respond flexibly to future uncertain work patterns within a sustainable career ecosystem.

This article reports on the Australian Indigenous Design Charter: Communication Design (the Charter), exploring the needs and motivations behind the development of this document and the growing demand for designers to understand and apply ethical practices when working on projects involving the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture. This best practice guide presents a concise, workable set of protocols for communication designers to follow. In this instance, the focus sits squarely on design practitioners to develop respectful processes of communication, consultation and collaboration whenever Australian indigenous culture is referenced in commercial applications. This article reflects on the impetus and objectives of a practice document, framed to accommodate past and present ontologies that speak to all stakeholders. The concept of an open document is espoused as a key feature of the Charter, whereby opinions and comments will be gathered, analysed and used to inform future, periodical iterations of the Charter.