"Trust, Tension and Designing Change: A Design Research Partnership with Corrective Services NSW (PID129)

1.30pm – 2pm GMT, 27 October 2026 ‐ 30 mins

Room: Hall 1A (Level 1)

Parallel Workshops

What does it take to build a university–corrections partnership that lasts over a decade and a half? This presentation tells the story of a design research collaboration between a university design team and Corrective Services New South Wales (NSW), Australia - one that has produced over forty projects, academic publications, design reports, guidelines and exhibitions as well as contributions through presentations and network involvement at ICPA events.
By design, we mean not simply architecture but a broader practice: the design of services, products, digital tools, organisational strategy, and collaborative processes. Projects have ranged from co-designing an Intensive Learning Centre in a maximum-security prison - assessed as high-impact research by the Australian Research Council - to contributing to a digital rehabilitation platform, to A Place to Go, an alternative residential model for young people at risk of incarceration.
The presentation is honest about what sustains this kind of partnership and what makes it difficult. Trust, built incrementally across organisations with different ways of working, is key. So are the tensions: insider and outsider positions, agency and ownership, the gap between design vision and embedded practice, and within the university, the challenge of sustaining work that does not fit neatly into existing disciplinary or metric frameworks.
Above all, this is a story about what can be achieved — and what this model of sustained, relationship-based university–corrections collaboration offers to others committed to more humane and effective correctional practice.