Current Wonderings
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Design meets Policy Making, Emerging Technologies + Visual Ethnography
Towards the goal of a policy-making process that can anticipate as yet undisclosed futures, this body of work explores the role of ethnography in offering rich insights into how people are living with emerging technologies and the capacity of design to surface people’s hopes and fears for what comes next.
An applied collaboration with Michael Mintrom and Shanti Sumartojo.
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Design meets Science of Learning, Affect Theory + Cognitive Psychology
An exploration of the methods and moves that create memory-making, perspective-shifting and hands-on learning encounters to drive sustained change.
This co-design research scaffolds the courageous and curious shiftwork required to revise the stories we tell ourselves, unlearn old habits and embrace ways of showing up in the world.
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Design meets Play, Education, Performance Studies + Indigenous Knowing.
An exploratory space that entangles ways of knowing, doing and being by playing, wondering and narrating. Together we sense-make the affinities of a relational, reciprocal, reflexive, responsible and respectful research practice.
A Kolding/Monash collaboration with Stacy Holman Jones, Helle Marie Skovbjerg, Shanti Sumartojo and Anne-Lene Sand.
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Design meets Organisational Change, + Professional Learning
A program of workshops, conversations and mappings that explore how co-design’s orientation to engagement and translation can amplify research impact.
A collaboration that supports not just the transactional how of doing things differently, but the transformative potential of deeply interrogating why we should do things differently.
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Design meets Auto-ethnography, Indigenous Story-telling, Affect Theory + Creative Writing.
Our work with people calls on us to grapple with concepts of power, equity, trauma, diversity, and belonging in ways that are often erased from the public narrative of the research. This body of work explores first-person narratives as a way for researcher’s to ethically and reflexively attune to the onto-epistemic orientation of a participatory practice.
A collaboration with Stacy Holman Jones, Hannah Korsmeyer, Shanti Sumartojo and Alli Edwards.
New Book Out Now
A playbook on designing transformative learning encounters, the book shares a playful and practical approach to learning from and adapting to a rapidly changing world. Stories from design practice and the science. of learning come together to scaffold the courageous and curious challenge of shiftwork.
Recent Publications & Projects
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Design for Transformative Learning
A Practical Approach to Memory-Making and Perspective-Shifting
Routledge Book
Lisa Grocott -
Impact by Design
Exploring the shiftwork required for researchers committed to designing for social impact
Designing for Social Impact
Lisa Grocott, Shanti Sumartojo, Wade Kelly and Stuart Geddes -
The Tomorrow Party
A time travel method for engaging with lived experience
The Tomorrow Party
Lisa Grocott, Shanti Sumartojo, Michael Mintrom, Stacy Holman Jones, Myf Doughty and Hannah Korsmeyer -
Understanding Feminist Anticipation through ‘Back-talk’
3 Narratives of Wilful, Deviant, and Care-full Co-design Practices
Futures Journal
Hannah Korsmeyer, Ann Light, Lisa Grocott
Kia Ora
I am a Professor of Design and the Director of WonderLab at Monash University, Australia.
My relational approach to designing transformative learning is informed by collaborations with learning scientists, ethnographic methodologists and social psychologists while drawing on my co-design practice expertise and Indigenous practices.
Born in Aotearoa, New Zealand I have Ngāti Kahugnunu whakapapa on my mother’s side, Scottish and English on my father’s. On my side, I live in Melbourne with my two Brooklyn-born sons.