WORKAROUND Women Design Action
RMIT Design Hub, 2018
WORKAROUND engages with a movement of women focused on advocacy and activism within an expanded field of architecture. Each of these practitioners works towards positive change in the built environment and its surrounding cultures. WORKAROUND is an online broadcast and a program of live events. Across fourteen daily episodes, fourteen Australian practitioners each present a critique, conversation, interview, workshop or performance that articulates their strategies and workarounds and reflects on their activist practice.
This episode of WORKAROUND – led by designer and activist Mary Featherston with teaching staff from Princes Hill Primary School – seeks to convey the essence of the ‘collective inquiry’ educational approach. Working with a filmmaker, students travel to Mary’s atelier and garden where they will undertake a studio-based learning experience. The children are invited to explore Mary’s life-long collection of natural objects – her personal ‘cabinet of curiosities’. On returning to Design Hub, the children discuss and unfold their experiences. Children and adults gather around Design Hub’s purpose-designed ‘round table’ to discuss what this experience has meant to them, what sparked their sense of wonder and curiosity, what they find interesting and what are their passions. They explore how they pursue their own interests and how they can entice others to explore with them. In this way, the episode seeks to reveal how people like to learn.