Purta ngkarrama (In dialogue together): co-designing and co-learning in Ntaria

Abstract

ABSTRACT Co-designing with Indigenous people premises an obligation to participation as a fundamentally ontological and transformational place-based way of working, often challenging the dominant notions of what ‘participation’ and ‘design’ means in practice. This paper considers how non-Indigenous design researchers engage and transform through being in dialogue together on Country. Here, the Western Arrarnta concepts of ‘purta ngkarrama’, of people talking together in dialogue, and ‘purta kaltjerrama’, of people learning together, are explored as ways to realise pluriversal and decolonial approaches to co-design. Drawing on personal reflexive learnings from a four-year co-design education programme in the Aboriginal community of Ntaria, in the Central Desert of Australia, these dialogues emerged through exploring Western Arrarnta's ways of learning, doing, being, and designing. Becoming a participant ‘in’ dialogue, ‘on’ Country, requires us to rethink ways of participating within design research. Premising talking and learning together in dialogue presents an opportunity for co-design researchers to be personally engaged, embodied, and transformed through research – and where more accounts of listening and learning together can emerge.