Envisioning Hospitable Futures through Design

Rebecca Nally, RMIT Industry Fellow and author of Hospitable Futures.

By: Rachel Worcou

When you reflect on your connection to food what comes to mind? Childhood memories steeped in rich, homely recipes, a concoction of your favourite flavours? Or maybe it's the evenings gathered around the dining table with friends and family? At the root of this ritual is an understanding that food is grounded in much more than what gets served on the table.

For centuries, the exchange of food has long been a centrepiece for community connection, intertwining generations through the practice of shared meals and cultural practice, sustaining not just our physical bodies but also the intimate and public spaces that make up our communities.

Yet, what does it mean to make a place hospitable? How, then, might place-based practices allow us to reconnect to food histories and futures? Additionally, what is the role of the designer in fostering such hospitalities? These are just some of the questions being challenged by design students of Hospitable Futures.

Authored in 2019 by Creative Director and Industry Fellow, Rebecca Nally, Hospitable Futures is a design studio from RMIT’s Bachelor of Communication Design. Through place-based investigations, students explore how through design they can begin to contextualise and interrogate the current and future state of hospitality, food-led experiences and systems.

“We diverge and converge in the studio – moving from governance and policy to operational detail. Students interrogate the interconnectedness of place and hospitality strategy” notes Nally.

Students dissect the function of hospitality, as relating to agriculture, food, urban design, environmental and retail spaces, and more specifically placemaking, as explained by student Clayton Murdoch.

“Placemaking can help designers get a better understanding of a community’s needs and priorities, leading to public spaces that are more responsive to the community’s unique context and culture. As designers, I think we can sometimes forget that places are not static canvases but echoes of the histories, politics and economics of their surrounding context – and the ways in which they are imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, and experienced are different for each person,” says Clayton.

Brochure design by student, Clayton Murdoch.

Clayton’s incisive reflection on placemaking as an echo of surrounding contexts serves as a reminder that the transformation of public spaces into inclusive and sustainable spaces cannot be actualised without addressing the wider socio-political and cultural codes embedded within the fabric of our built environment. This begs the question of the responsibility of the designer, and supporting actors, in upholding or dismantling such codes.

By interrogating such responsibilities, we can explore placemaking’s potential – across hospitality, public space, residential, retail and so on – in challenging the dominant culture to serve a multitude of purposes beyond privatised needs and toward inclusive, generative outcomes that respond to a community’s social and cultural context.

Beyond placemaking and cross-disciplinary lines of inquiry, students collaborated with Cities People Love. Initiated by urban design studio, Hodyl & Co, Cities People Love is a social enterprise organisation dedicated to the curation and creation of urban research.

Their research release ‘Making Suburbs Inclusive’ served as a framework for students to research the barriers preventing access to equitable food systems, with the aim of utilising existing resources to design a concept that improved current food systems for people living in suburban environments.

Students of Hospitable Futures engage in a workshop.

The ‘status quo’ for how we plan, design and deliver our urban environments is unsustainable. It creates enormous waste, produces significant emissions, creates social inequities, and is resistant to change’ – Cities People Love.

Rachel Maguire, Associate Social Researcher at Hodyl & Co, worked with students over six weeks to guide them through a range of feedback sessions that contextualised their research around place-based practices.

Students investigated food sovereignty, modes of food production, agricultural practices and more. What emerged were sustainable, innovative ways of seeing that addressed safe food access for the houseless, culturally-informed cooking programs for children, reimagining the use of nature strips, and revitalising abandoned lots into community-run gardens. Such responses allow us to observe the role of design within hospitality as serving more than aesthetic and sensory purposes.

Rather than relying on form and function as the guiding principle through which to examine its impact, design students are starting to acknowledge the role of design as a liberatory tool for collective care – for people, land and Country.

This can be echoed through Clayton’s insight, where he reflects, “Engaging with the layers of a place and the stories of the communities we are designing for is an important consideration for any designer, but especially to us as people living and working on Stolen Land; it’s about acknowledging the history of a place and the ongoing connections to Country.”

Brochure design by students of Hospitable Futures, 2023.

Looking to the future of the industry, Nally describes what she believes design graduates will need to make an impact in building hospitable futures.

“I’m always heartened by their sensitivity and intellect. I think building skills in responsible design practice, in a safe learning environment, sets them up to make a positive impact.

“Their skills,” she adds, “in communicating and designing in response to Country enables them to practise design with a sense of responsibility and citizenship.”

When we think of our connection to food and hospitality, it's imperative that we, as designers, reflect beyond the cultural or the aesthetic. In doing so, we’re able to observe design not as central-to but one part of a process that recognises the vital role of co-creating sensitive and sustainable ways of being with, and responding to, land based practices.