Areli Avendano Franco

Working across Service Design, Social Innovation, and Critical Design studies. My teaching and practice is grounded in anti-colonial and pluriversal design theory, Buen Vivir as a relational alternative to growth-oriented development, and on autonomous design's insistence that communities' own place-based logics, not externally imposed frameworks, should lead. I treat materials, waste, and ecological systems as entangled and relational, resisting the extractive, single-output logic that terms like "regenerative design" can quietly inherit from the same Western frameworks they claim to move beyond.

This extends into a critical engagement with anti-colonial design as both pedagogy and method, questioning the epistemic authority conventionally granted to imported, Euro-centric models of innovation, and creating space for Indigenous and originary knowledge systems as legitimate, co-equal ways of designing. At the human scale, autonomous design's attention to relationality also shapes work on the emotional and affective labour that sustains participatory and community-engaged design, the care work of building and holding relationships that is rarely acknowledged as "real" design practice, but without which no participatory process survives. This runs through my teaching on Community-led crisis/disaster design, developed under a Learning and Teaching Sustainability Fellowship, and through a household food-waste study that took seriously the everyday, relational labour of families rather than treating behaviour change as an individual, rational choice.

I welcome supervision on honours projects, Master's and PhD research in service design/social innovation,  pluriversal and anti-colonial design, Community-led crisis/disaster design, and packaging sustainability, and welcome prospective candidates and collaborators whose work sits within or unsettles these frameworks. My research has been supported by grants and partnerships exceeding $100,000, with organisations including Australia Post, Deloitte, Sustainability Victoria, and the Australian Red Cross, and I remain committed to collaborations that bridge academic, industry, and community contexts, in Australia and internationally.