Research Interest: Co-design

Ruth believes in partnering with consumers, families, and communities in order to create more generative collective alternatives through participatory and co-design methods. In 2020 Ruth and colleagues Leah Heiss, Olivia Hamilton, Marius Foley, and Olga Kokshagina at RMIT University delivered a co-design workshop to understand the future practices and ideal spaces for a university health education and research precinct at QUT. The project had four phases, first, to develop a participatory toolkit; second, to engage an interdisciplinary facilitation team; third, to engage participants in envisioning future practices to take place in the precinct; and finally, to link the translation of future practices and values to spatial principles to drive architectural planning processes. Ruth also collaborated with Leah Heiss, Marius Foley and Larissa Hjorth to codesign a Future Visioning workshop for Melbourne Ageing Research Collaboration (MARC) a unique collaboration of health, research, aged care and advocacy organizations working together to improve the lives of older people. Using persona case studies to mobilize the MARC community to create a vision statement that was both aspirational and pragmatic. Ruth has been a Guest Lecturer for The Master of Design Futures at RMIT University.