Dr Desiree Ibinarriaga

Desiree Ibinarriaga, Mexican-Indigenous woman, with Chamula (Mayan), Nahuatl (Aztec) and Euskaldunak (Basque) heritage. She is a collaborative and social design maker and thinker, lecturer at Monash Art Design and Architecture, Coordinator for Indigenous Higher Degrees by Research being part of Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab.

Desiree is a passionate designer, researcher, educator and traveller. She has over 14 years of experience in the design field, across diverse disciplines, such as furniture, interior, social, decolonising and Indigenous design. Desiree’s work focuses on Indigenous peoples’ building of capacity and better ways of partnership and communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through design, by recognising the relationality between people and environment while acknowledging the world as a unit. Her teaching practice encourages students to develop understanding of Indigenous methodologies and their own cultural identity through a collaborative design practice.

Since 2012 she has collaborated with diverse Indigenous communities, organisations and universities in Mexico and Australia. In her PhD at Deakin University, she developed the methodology Critical Co-design and its Method: The Biocultural Workshop.

Critical Co-design is an Indigenous methodology for respectfully collaborating with Indigenous peoples, acknowledging the interconnection between relationality, Place, identity (positionality) and methodology in the field of co-design. The methodology encourages the collaboration between diverse Indigenous and non-Indigenous people while privileging Indigenous knowledges enhancing biocultural diversity conservation and regeneration towards collaborative resilience, cultural identity pride and sustainability.

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