The theme for this year’s National Reconciliation Week (NRW) is “Bridging Now to Next”, which explores the ongoing connection between past, present and future.

This theme provides a great way to think about Country-led design, which links yarns told by Traditional Custodians and Knowledge Holders to design thinking and built outcomes that restore the health and wellbeing of Country.  

For today’s morning tea we were joined by Matt Muir, who in addition to being a long-time practice friend is also a Planning and Design Officer and BLK1000 Community Tutor at Monash University. Matt has also worked at Wardle and in Urban Regeneration at Lendlease.

Matt and Sarah had a great yarn about the challenge of changing established design thinking, their experiences teaching students about Country-led design and the way that Country-led thinking – appreciating a site’s ecology, history, plants and animals – is at its heart best-practice design thinking, the kind of thinking all good projects should do.