STAFF PROFILE
Ms Tania Ivanka
Tania explores, teaches, designs and researches in sustainability, transition design, systemic thinking and systemic design, codesign for health care, collaborative visualisation and sensemaking.
Tania’s design practice and research is informed by her background in permaculture (a process of systems thinking applied to the design of land, spaces and communities for sustainable food production and habitation). Tania's research interests include building resilience within communities using a systemic thinking framework, and raising awareness and understanding of human settlement as being in relationship with and dependent upon the ecosphere. Originally practicing these values through guerrilla gardening, community gardening, and ‘permablitzing’ (a social network for retrofitting gardens for food production), Tania’s journey continues via make sense of complexity through collaborative visualisation.
2009 Tania completed her Master of Design (Communication Design) by research, investigating the cultivation of a sustaining design practice embedding sustainability into both work and life practice. This postgraduate research included mapping and visualisations of her research projects as systems of both material and cultural production.
Read Tania's Master of Design thesis: “Cultivating tactics for a change in practice: A designer's quest to merge personal values with communication design practice, and what happened along the way …”
2009–2010 With Dr Yoko Akama, Tania took part in Birds of a feather: Cultivating community networks and building resilience through a co-design process to enhance community bush fire preparedness, a Bush Fire preparedness research project in Southern Otways (Supported by RMIT Design Research Institute). In partnership with the Southern Otways Landcare Network the team used design methods to initiate engagement, prompt thinking and discussion, facilitate awareness and reveal tacit knowledge among the community related to bushfire planning. Playful Triggers were used to facilitate visualisation and mapping site-specific knowledge and 'What if' scenarios were used to prompt thinking and planning for unexpected events.
Public presentation: 2009, Yoko Akama, Tania Ivanka and Tony Coyle, Birds of a Feather: Emboldening community spirit and connectedness in bushfire resilience, Design for Fire: Challenge Pitch, 24 July, BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne.
Grants: Akama, Y. and Ivanka, T. 2009, ‘Birds of a Feather: emboldening community spirit and connectedness for bushfire resilience’ in partnership with the Southern Otways Landcare Network, August 2009–December 2010, $4,000 from Bushfire CRC).
Video presented in the State of Design Festival, 15–21 July, 2010: “Empowering Communities Through Design”
2010–2011 Tania was a member of a permablitz team designing food gardens for The Friends of the Earth eco-market project “South Melbourne Commons”.
2014–2015 Tania worked with Richard Cooney (Swinburne) and Nifeli Stewart (RMIT) on the best practice of the Worksafe Victoria, Return to Work system, using visualisation to make sense of and represent the complex relationships and practices of the multi stakeholder system.
Tania’s research continues through her PhD in Industrial Design at RMIT exploring Codesign for healthcare using participatory and systemic thinking principles to inform collaborative visualisation for making sense of complex social situations.
Follow Tania’s online spaces via about.me/taniaivanka
Tania teaches across all three year levels of the
She is currently undertaking a PhD (part time) in Industrial Design (
Tania teaches across all three year levels of the
She is currently undertaking a PhD (part time) in Industrial Design (
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Graduate Certificate of Applied Social Research, Deakin University. 2011–2013.
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Master of Design by Research, RMIT University. 2005–2009 (part time)
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Bachelor of Visual Arts (Graphic Design) with Honours (First Class), La Trobe University Bendigo. 1994–1997 (fulltime)
Committee Member of Desis-lab Melbourne
Member of the Permablitz Designer’s Guild
- Akama, Y.,Anich, J.,Avendano Franco, A.,Choi, J.,Fennessy, L.,Foley, M.,Heiss, L.,Ivanka, T.,Luke, E.,Page, R.,Rosenqvist, T.,Sanin, J.,Tan, L. (2022). Why are we here? A reflexive story of decolonising In: PDC '22: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022, Newcastle, UK, 19th August - 1st September 2022
- Cooney, R.,Stewart, N.,Ivanka, T.,Haslem, N. (2018). Representational artefacts in social problem solving: A study from occupational rehabilitation In: Design Studies: the international journal for design research in engineering, architecture, products and systems, 56, 149 - 168
- Cooney, R.,Stewart, N.,Ivanka, T.,Haslem, N. (2016). Design and the creation of representational artefacts for interactive social problem solving In: Proceedings of the 2016 Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference, Brighton, United Kingdom, 27-30 June 2016
- Ivanka, T.,Akama, Y.,Duque Hurtado, M.,Sanin, J. (2015). Scales, spheres and relationships: an approach to educating future designers In: Proceedings of the Unmaking Waste 2015 Conference: Co-creating sustainable design (UWM 2015), Adelaide, Australia, 22-24 May 2015
- Akama, Y.,Ivanka, T. (2012). Enabling Communities: Community-based innovation in designing for bushfire preparedness In: Premier's Design Awards Melbourne, Australia
- Akama, Y.,Ivanka, T. (2010). What community? Facilitating awareness of community through playful triggers In: PDC 2010: Participation, The Challenge, Sydney, November 29 - December 3 2010
- Akama, Y.,Ivanka, T. (2010). Empowering Communities through Design In: Design for Everyone, Melbourne State of Design Exhibition Melbourne, Australia
- Ivanka, T.,Parker, A.,Yuille, J. (2006). Seeding research methods into industry: applying postgraduate research models to undergraduate curricula In: Enhancing Curricula: contributing to the future, meeting the challenges of the 21st century in the disciplines of art, design and communication, ,
- Vaughan, L.,Akama, Y.,Haslem, N.,Ryan, J.,Ivanka, T.,Abd Rahman, Z.,Dunbar, M.,Deverell, K.,Geddes, S. (2006). Fashion city In: L'Oreal Melbourne fashion festival, cutlural event Melbourne, Australia