Designing with Country: Rethinking Practice + Responsibility

Architects, planners and built-environment professionals spend a great deal of time imagining the future. Yet here, on the world’s oldest continuous cultures’ lands, the future will remain impoverished unless we learn to listen, properly, humbly, attentively, to the past. The Australian Institute of Architects’ First Nations Advisory Committee and Cultural Reference Panel (FNAC) has released its first resource clarifying key terms that sit at the centre of this national conversation. It arrives not a moment too soon.

As the country now called Australia updates its legislative frameworks, competency requirements and cultural protocols, the industry is discovering something Indigenous writers have been generously articulating for decades: that design is not an isolated act, and Country is not a background.

As Ambelin Kwaymullina reminds us in her book Living on Stolen Land,

“Country is alive, creative, sentient, filled with relations rather than resources.”¹

If this sounds poetic, that’s because it is. If it sounds like common sense, that’s because it should be. But as FNAC notes, common sense does not always guide consulting tender documents.

The Problem With Using Big Words Without Big Understanding

Terms like Indigenous design, Co-design, Country-centred design and Designing with Country increasingly appear in briefs and proposals, sometimes as heartfelt commitments, sometimes as decorative flourishes placed there with the optimism of a pot plant in a meeting room no one remembers to water. The issue is not bad intent. The issue is that these terms mean something, and they do not mean the same thing.

Designing with Country, in particular, has become a phrase travelling a little too freely, like a tourist who has learned three local words and is suddenly giving directions to the airport. First Nations architects and communities have watched the term drift from its roots: a deeply relational, culturally grounded practice led by Knowledge Holders, Elders and First Nations design professionals.

A central insight of Designing with Country is deceptively simple: Country teaches. This is not metaphor. Country is a co-designer, though, as FNAC playfully notes, it cannot hold a pen, mouse or BIM license. It communicates through ecology, memory, story, wind direction, water lines, species behaviour and deep-time cultural knowledge handed down over millennia.

Non-Indigenous designers often express a desire to “read” Country, but reading is difficult when one has not learned the alphabet. And that alphabet belongs, respectfully, to family lines, Knowledge Holders, Elders, clan groups and communities whose relationships to place far exceed the lifespan of any practice, university or planning scheme. Designing with Country is not something one can learn from a PowerPoint slide or a short course, though both may help a little to open the door to deeper learning.

As Tyson Yunkaporta writes in Sand Talk, “Understanding requires relationship.”² And relationship requires time, trust, humility and the willingness to be guided rather than to lead.

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) is a living system of stories, practices, land-based knowledge and creative expressions held by specific families and communities. A First Nations architect’s Designing with Country approach often arises from ICIP combined with their own professional expertise. When non-Indigenous practitioners claim to undertake “Designing with Country” without cultural authority, relational grounding or community leadership, they unintentionally step into moral territory best avoided: claiming expertise derived from knowledges that are not theirs.

This isn’t just a procedural misstep. It is, as Yunkaporta might put it, “a pattern break”, a disruption of the rightful flow of knowledge between people and place.

The potential of genuine Designing with Country is extraordinary. Imagine an architectural vernacular unique to each region, one shaped by local stories, soils, winds, ecologies and Elders’ knowledge. Imagine brief-writing with listening circles on Country. Imagine planning decisions shaped by the health, wellbeing and sovereignty of place.

This is is a sophisticated design methodology grounded in tens of thousands of years of human and more-than-human intelligence. It is slow in the best possible way.

What Non-Indigenous Practitioners Can Do

Non-Indigenous designers can design with respect for Country. They can collaborate, co-design and contribute to meaningful, culturally responsive outcomes; when First Nations professionals and communities lead the process. They can help dismantle legislative barriers that force harmful decisions, advocate for appropriate timelines and challenge tokenistic gestures masquerading as reconciliation through design.

What they cannot do: ethically, culturally, or professionally, is claim the Designing with Country methodology as their own. To do so is to take on a story that does not belong to them.

Clients hold the purse strings and an extraordinary power. When they invest early in relationship-building, seek First Nations leadership before the brief is drafted, and refuse tokenistic outcomes, they enable the conditions for design processes that genuinely honour Country. Leadership from clients determines whether Designing with Country becomes a transformative force or merely an empty checkbox.

The FNAC resources are more than a glossary; they are an invitation to design differently, ethically, relationally and with care for future generations. To misapply or dilute Designing with Country is to lose not just a term, but an opportunity to reshape the profession with integrity.

Country is speaking. The question is whether we are listening.

References

1. Kwaymullina, A. (2005). Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living.

2. Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.