Manuela Taboada

Background

About Manuela Taboada

I lead transdisciplinary and transcultural teams of designers and non-designers working together to generate ideas, strategies and systemic interventions towards meaningful change. I am an expert in designing, developing and deploying bespoke co-design workshops based on systems thinking, speculative fictions and complex emergence. As a designer, researcher and educator, I have developed creative collaborative design methods based on games design, worldbuilding and story-telling to incorporate traditional and tacit knowledges and create effective, meaningful and transformative innovation through collaboration. I am a specialist in creative problem solving and in harnessing identity and action through design. I worked for 14 years as a Senior Lecturer at QUT School of Design and a chief research investigator in the QUT Design Lab. With more than 20 years experience as a designer, researcher and educator working in Australia, Brazil, East Timor and Fiji, I have highly sophisticated skills in visual communication, creative problem solving through storytelling and in leading teams of designers and educators. I use decolonial thought and complex systems theory to guide my design practice and research. My most recent research efforts are focused on science communication around climate change and plastic waste mitigation. I apply systemic approaches to transitioning systems, policies and perceptions. I also have contributions on the field of design philosophy where I explore concepts and principles around design as ontology and decolonial design.