Designing a Future
for the Great Ocean Road
radical ideas, new visions and bold proposals for Victoria’s greatest ’tourism drawcard’.
widely with experts and community members, this new project adopts
a design approach to reimagining what is possible to achieve a
truly sustainable – regenerative and resilient – future for the Great Ocean Road .
The Road Today
This extraordinary and diverse south-western region of the state of Victoria, Australia, has a coastal road constructed more than 100 years ago as a war memorial. It connects towns and villages with around twenty-five thousand residents. The region is thought to have been continuously inhabited for thirty to fifty thousand years. ‘The Road’ is recognised as one of the world’s great ocean drives, attracting more tourists per year than the iconic Australian sites of Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef combined.
The Road Before
Frequently called a ‘a living memorial’ or ‘a national treasure’, the road is not only valued for its scenery, landscapes and environments, but for its history. There are representations of history in tourist advertising, in monuments and place names and most settlements have some form of local history celebration. Even so, the richness of the region’s history is not always evident, it is layered and often obscured, even misrepresented.
The Road Ahead:
Designing GOR Futures
This project will expand the field of creative thinking about strategies to address the challenges of planning and governance of the Great Ocean Road and its hinterland as a visitor/tourism destination.
From 2021, Victorian university design schools, supported by multi-disciplinary academic research and with input from the community, government and industry, are focusing on future possibilities for the Great Ocean Road.
Why design futures?
Any sustainable future for this destination will result from the exploration of issues that have economic, cultural, technological, environmental and behavioural dimensions. Such exploration requires multi-disciplinary analysis, systems thinking and the visualisation of possible outcomes. It is ideally suited to the work of design schools in universities as they orient their pedagogical and research activities to become laboratories for critical innovation.
‘Local’ Community Engagement
This is fundamental to the process. COVID allowing, there are plans for local community workshops along the road, with some of the studios focusing on a selected locale, interacting with, and drawing on, local knowledge. A new network of Ocean Road Communities – the GOR Community Network (GORCN) – has been established with representatives of community organisations in towns stretching from Torquay to Port Campbell. This is an important base for local input to this project.
Wherever and whenever possible (COVID allowing) the project will arrange presentations of research, analysis and concept development, for local discussion.
International collaboration
The Great Ocean Road (as a tourist destination) has counterparts around the world and this project is building research collaboration with several other countries.
Design frameworks:
regenerative; resilient; participative;
including indigenous knowledge traditions.
Approaching design from a systems perspective is central to this project. To guide design thinking a set of conceptual frameworks have been agreed that will guide design thinking and propositions. Visioning will aim to be:
Regenerative – something beyond ‘sustainable’, particularly the ‘least-worse’ framings of that concept
Resilient – giving attention to structures that reduce the possibility of systems collapse after shocks
Participative – involving collaborative, co-design work with relevant communities
Open to indigenous knowledge traditions – First Nations’ stories, their patterns of life, their relationship to country, that has so shaped this landscape (and which uniquely delineates this tourist destination from all others in the world), should be deeply reflected in the exploration new possibilities that results from this project.