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2014: Bachelor of Design (Interior Design) – QUT
Sarah is a design strategist and educator across both the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, and the Faculty of Engineering at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She is also a research member of the Urban Informatics Research Group and the Design Lab at QUT. Sarah specialises in ‘designing for diversity’ and co-design processes, and has significant experience in designing tangible, accessible, and low-fi creative/arts-based community and stakeholder engagement tools for people with varying skill sets, knowledge, and abilities. Sarah has applied this approach to the design of interactive needs assessment activities for youth work settings, as well as for facilitating participant content creation for citizen engagement on urban development processes. In her own PhD project, she designed and tested creative and culturally appropriate methods for engaging with culturally and linguistically diverse women. Recently, Sarah has worked on several design research projects within the healthcare sector as part of the Healthcare Excellence AcceLarator (HEAL), including: ‘Co-designing a healing environment for PICU families and staff’, ‘Enhancing access to ‘just’ healthcare for culturally and linguistically diverse clients’, and ‘Connecting rehab services across West Moreton’. In addition to this project, Sarah and is also currently working on a project focused on ‘Redesigning the palliative care experience’ in collaboration with St Vincent’s Health & Aged Care (SVHAC), and another on ‘Co-designing Access in Art & Design Practice’ in collaboration with Artisan.
Sarah Johnstone’s areas of research are:
Co-design, transdisciplinary design, ‘design for diversity’, JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion), design justice, pluriversal design, Indigenous perspectives & decolonial theory/research methodologies, intersectional & eco-feminist theories, creative/arts-based engagement & placemaking methodologies, cross-cultural engagement, design for health, wellbeing & social inclusion, relational ontology, empowerment & care theory, and social ecology.