A New Design Story for Australia with Jessica Watson
A New Design Story for Australia with Jessica Watson
Meet your host Jessica Watson as she introduces The Feeling Designer Podcast — tracing her journey from communication design in Melbourne to brand strategy in London and Shanghai, through to co-design and social innovation at TACSI. She defines what it means to be a 'Feeling Designer' and shares the traits she's observed across 15 Melbourne-based participatory designers.
A New Design Story for Australia with Jessica Watson
Show Notes
Acknowledgement of Country + Why This Podcast Exists
- Notable quote: "A space where we explore how empathy, collaboration and working with people can transform the way we design."
- Actionable takeaway: Start every project by acknowledging place and people — let that context guide your design intent.
Jessica opens with an Acknowledgement of Country to the Wurundjeri people and frames the show as a space to explore empathy, collaboration, and people-led design in Australia. She sets the tone for a reflective, honest first episode focused on her journey and the decision points that shaped her as "the Feeling Designer."
From Art to Communication Design: Finding Strategy and Community
- Notable quote: "Those two things have driven me and have been the cornerstones of my whole experience."
- Actionable takeaway: Seek environments that pair learning with making — symposium, then sprints — to anchor strategy in real-world collaboration.
Jessica shares her pivot from fine art to communication design at Swinburne, influenced by her aunt and the promise of an honours year. Two cornerstones emerge: a strategy course with Bridgette Engler ("a futurist") and a research-led honours symposium with Wurundjeri Traditional Owners that mixed learning with making in multidisciplinary teams.
London Years: Falling in Love with Brand Strategy
- Notable quote: "I couldn't move on to another project unless I'd figured out the strategy… if it had a great story to it."
- Actionable takeaway: Before you design, write the story — clarify the promise, audience insight, and strategic throughline.
In London at JWDK, Jessica's first mentor, Kirsten Johnston, helps her see she's drawn to research, mood-boarding, and narrative. She realises she can't move forward on design until the story and strategy are clear — discovering a strength in brand strategy.
Back to Melbourne: Strategy in Property and Place
- Notable quote: "They could see strategy was an important part of my work… and their place strategy offering."
- Actionable takeaway: Make strategy visible — embed it in client artefacts, not just internal thinking.
Returning to Melbourne, she joins a property marketing agency that lets her flex strategy in brand and placemaking. She helps shape studio practice so strategy shows up in presentations and outcomes.
Shanghai: Multidisciplinary Place-Making at Scale
- Notable quote: "Everything was multidisciplinary and we really wove that story together through brand expression, interior wall designs, wayfinding… and events."
- Actionable takeaway: Map the ecosystem of a place and align all touchpoints — brand, space, programming — around one positioning.
Kirsten calls again — this time to Shanghai — where brand merges with property development. Jessica learns to weave story across tenancies, events, interiors, wayfinding, and spatial expression — truly multidisciplinary place work at speed and scale.
Coming Home: Choosing People-Led, Experience-Led Design (Freestate)
- Notable quote: "People led, experience led, multidisciplinary."
- Actionable takeaway: Work upstream — co-create the north star strategy that architecture, brand, and operations can align to.
After reflective time in Australia, Jessica seeks teams that start with human insights and align architecture, interiors, and brand to one strategy. At Freestate (within an architecture practice), she learns how large precincts, airports, and campuses are speculated, briefed, funded, and delivered.
Going Solo: The Hustle of Experience Design Consulting
- Notable quote: "How to sell this thing called experience design… and what value it could bring."
- Actionable takeaway: Productise your value — name the outcomes, show the methods, and offer tiered pathways to engage.
Jessica launches her own consultancy to bring research and human-centered methods to collaborators in wayfinding, experience design, and activation. She quickly learns the business side — proposals, pricing options, articulating value.
Deepening Practice: Aboriginal Studies, TACSI, and Defining "The Feeling Designer"
- Notable quote: "The feeling designer is a person who feels deeply… and [is] designing for feelings and with people's feelings."
- Actionable takeaway: Build cultural capability — invest in learning and relationships that help you design with, not for.
A postgraduate certificate in Aboriginal Studies, including time on Country in Broome, is "absolutely transformative," sharpening her desire to work closer with communities. Joining TACSI, she practices participatory co-design and articulates "the feeling designer" as both noun and verb: designing with and for feelings toward more just futures.
Why This Podcast Now: Co-Creation, Local Identity, Trauma-Informed Practice
- Notable quote: "Work with the communities we seek to serve, instead of designing for them."
- Actionable takeaway: Audit your process: Where are lived-experience voices shaping decisions? Where are your trauma-informed guardrails?
Jessica critiques the pace and global-referential default of the industry and argues for starting with local stories and contexts. She outlines co-creation across the ecosystem, trauma-informed safeguards in research, and bridging silos between brand, space, and events.
What Makes a Feeling Designer + Call to Action
- Notable quote: "You can't pour from an empty cup." and "Every great movement starts with a feeling."
- Actionable takeaway: Choose one trait to grow this month — e.g., add a reflective practice, invite a new discipline into your process, or localise your next mood board with place-based stories.
- Jessica Watson
- The Feeling Designer
- TACSI — The Australian Centre for Social Innovation
From 15 Melbourne-based participatory designers, she distils shared traits: communication design roots; not "fitting in" to traditional studios; deep empathy and self-care; multidisciplinary collaboration; systems thinking and social impact; inclusive, experiential outcomes; reflective practice; and balanced global–local perspectives.
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