Design Frameworks
GOR FuturesDesign Directions – Resilience and Regenerative
‘Regenerative’
Challenging ‘least-worst’ conceptualisations of sustainability.
Put most simply, the intention in this futures design work is to push the government and the new GOR Authority to look beyond standard models for sustaining high profile tourist destinations. Strategies to deliver sustainable tourist destinations often amount to little more than slowing down extractive-tourism impacts, merely delaying the inevitable loss of intrinsic character, value and features that made the destination attractive in the first place.
Our use of the metaphorical terminology of regenerative (as a goal for this work) is one way of asserting that our objectives must reach beyond the idea of ‘sustaining things for a while’. As a simple interpretation of the term suggests, we want to implant the idea that all visitation/tourism could leave the destination in better state – tourism as part of a virtuous circle.
Resilience design
There has been a lot written about the importance of social/community resilience as communities deal with changes and shocks such as fires an storms.
There is another dimension of resilience that is often a more critical consideration: resilient infrastructure. How can the infrastructure of the GOR destination (at different scales) provide for a reduction in vulnerabilities, and support more resilient outcomes, in the face of anticipated shocks (heat waves, fires, droughts and floods, erosion, pandemics, and so on). This is an issue for physical infrastructure (e.g road designs allowing for evacuation, water supply, effective communications, fire breaks) as much as it is about the structure of local economies. If a local community along the road is too dependent on tourism for income, that may create a significant vulnerability when external shocks disrupt tourist flow.
The resilience of the people of the Eastern Mar and the Wudawurrung is an inspiration: their custodianship of this land spanned periods of the last ice age, the separation of Tasmania from the mainland, the separation of New Guinea and Australia and periods of volcanic activity.
Participative
Designing for transformative change – creating visions of new future possibilities with the power to generate societal support for their realisation – has to emerge from a participative, co-design process. That places designers working in a dialogue with people who have knowledge of emerging challenges and opportunities as well as those with an interest in the futures under consideration. In this project, the link with universities and with local communities is fundamental to its processes. In practical terms the project will attempt to site its design activities – though ateliers, workshops and exhibitions – as much as possible in GOR locations where such dialogues can take place. (See ‘local’ community engagement).
Including Indigenous Knowledge Traditions
The Victorian government Action Plan commits to a process of engagement with the Traditional Owners of the land of the Great Ocean Road: to acknowledge their custodianship of the land and seas, to recognise their rights, to partner with and support an active role for the Wadawurrung and Eastern Maar in the development of policies, planning and management of the GOR, its coastlines, landscapes and seas.
In this project, we too embrace a commitment to Traditional Owner Inclusion. Here, the core activity is the design of new possibilities, new models, for the future of the road and the region. Acknowledging indigenous custodianship affects more than our process, it introduces a new conceptual terrain to the act of design thinking: the knowledge traditions that have been a dominant force in this landscape for tens of thousands of years. The First Nations’ stories, their patterns of life, their relationship to country that has so shaped this landscape (and which uniquely delineates this tourist destination from all others in the world), should be deeply reflected in the exploration new possibilities that results from this project.
Including indigenous knowledge traditions is a richly generative force for this creative work.