PhD; Grad Dip Int Des (with Distinction), B App Sc Blt Env (with Distinction)
At St Margaret’s 1982-1986
Dr Natalie Wright is a Senior Lecturer and QUT Design Lab Design Education Program Leaders in the QUT Faculty of Creative Industries, School of Design, with over ten years’ experience as an educator and twenty years as an award-winning commercial Interior Designer, gained in Australia, Japan and the UK.
As a Fellow, and former National Director and State Co-President of the Design Institute of Australia, she has been an active voluntary advocate for professional design and design education since 2003 and has represented Australia at International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI) General Assemblies. From 2014 -2016 she undertook a secondment as Manager of the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) Asia Pacific Design Library (APDL), initiating G20 Cultural Program events and the annual Asia Pacific Architecture Forum in collaboration with Architecture Media.
Natalie’s academic research interests, publications and curated events explore socially responsible design, community engagement, and design thinking and design-led educational innovation approaches in the secondary and tertiary contexts as a framework for the development of 21st century skills and lifelong learning. Since 2010, when she directed the goDesign travelling design immersion program into six regional Queensland high schools, alongside the unleashed: queensland design on tour 2010 Regional Travelling Design Exhibition, she has co-developed and facilitated over 45 Queensland state/local government and privately funded design immersion programs for school teachers and students, and collaborated on the development of the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) APDL Design Minds website (http://designonline.org.au/education/), which won a Good Design Australian Award in 2018. More recently her research is exploring aspects related to the implementation of the 2019 Queensland Senior Design Syllabus, the scaling up of teachers' capacity to teach creativity and innovation through design thinking in curriculum, and the facilitation of design expertise for non-designers.
In 2012, she was Chief Investigator for the Arts Queensland funded Knowledge Economy Market Development Mapping Study highlighting the scope and value of design education programs in Queensland, from primary school to the professional design sector. She was also a finalist for the Queensland Government Smart Design Fellowship Award for contribution to design in Queensland.
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