Tania Ivanka

Tania explores, teaches, designs and researches in sustainability, transition design, systemic thinking and systemic design, co-design 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.