design-withandfor-value — Natalia Gulbransen-Diaz

NATALIA GULBRANSEN-DIAZ

The future demands hope and imagination. I’m passionate about deploying critical, design-led approaches to address complex social challenges, with particular focus on investigating how we can design with/and/for communities envisioning positive futures.

Through practice-led inquiry and real-world collaborations with Australian NPOs, I work to understand the conditions and relationships that enable design to be generative rather than extractive, bridging theory and application to create responsive, situated engagements that contribute to ongoing conversations about design's role in community and public life.

My recently completed PhD, Design with/and/for Value, explored how design can support non-profit organisations in realising their collective ambitions beyond economic measures.

Email
CV
Publications [Google Scholar]

Research

Design with/and/for Value
Waste to Resilience: Sanitation against Stunting and Climate Vulnerability in Indonesian Informal Coastal Areas
Computational Creativity in the Classroom: Student-Led Co-Design of Generative AI Pedagogies in Design
Sonic Street Technologies: Australia
Broadening Horizons: Using curiosity to diversify behaviour
Usability Issues in Self-Service Technologies
COVID-19 Smart IoT Screening System Pilot at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network
Introspect

Design with/and/for Value

Index

Doctoral Thesis (PhD), 2020–2025
The University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

[design] [value theory] [non-profit organisations]

Publications:
Gulbransen-Diaz, N., & Hepburn, L. A. (2024). Grand narratives of Value and their relationship with design.

Gulbransen-Diaz, N., & Hepburn, L. A. (2024). Design x Non-Profits: towards an understanding of design integration in the Australian Non-Profit Sector.

To pursue value is not simply to seek a return – it is to declare something worth making, protecting, or fighting for. This doctoral research explores how design can support Australian non-profit organisations in their pursuit of value: the realisation of their collective ambitions in practice, shaped by multiple voices, shifting priorities, and layered definitions of success.

ABSTRACT: Design is increasingly applied across government, business, and policy domains as a means of responding to social and economic challenges. While its strategic potential is celebrated, less attention has been given to understanding how design might support non-profit organisations (NPOs) to achieve their intended visions. This doctoral research explores how design can support Australian non-profit organisations in their pursuit of value – the realisation of their collective ambitions in practice, often shaped by multiple voices, shifting priorities, and layered definitions of success.

Combining theoretical inquiry with practice-led research, this work explores both how value is conceptualised and how it plays out in real-world collaborations. A series of design engagements with non-profit organisations serve as sites of exploration, providing insight into how designers can work with – and within – existing non-profit organisational practices. The research pays particular attention to the conditions, relationships, and design modes that enable design intent to be generative rather than extractive.

The thesis makes two central contributions. First, it develops a critical understanding of value in relation to design praxis – an offering informed by real-world applications and braced by theory. Second, it demonstrates designerly ways of engaging with non-profit organisations that are responsive, situated, and aligned with the evolving needs of non-profit practice. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations about design's role in community and public life – not only as a set of tools or methods, but as a practice of sustaining hope, making space for uncertainty, and imagining more generous futures into being.

HOW TO CITE:
Gulbransen-Diaz, N. (2025). Design with/and/for Value. Doctoral thesis, The University of Sydney.

KEY FINDINGS:
Through four studies — two literature analyses, a national survey of 140 Australian NPOs, and a pedagogical study with emerging and expert practitioners — three key findings emerged:

1. Value is multiple, unstable, and contextual
Value is rarely singular or fixed. The research reveals significant differences between how value is conceptualised in literature, how it is discussed within organisations, and how it is enacted in practice. Across 32 distinct perceptions of value identified in NPO and design literature, and five thematic notions surfaced through organisational research, the thesis demonstrates that value operates simultaneously across multiple registers. How one person talks about value may differ significantly from another's understanding, even within the same organisation. This multiplicity reflects the contested, negotiated nature of collective work.

2. Design can articulate and stabilise value (provisionally)
The research demonstrates that design artefacts–reports, frameworks, visualisations, prototypes–function as infrastructure for making ambiguous notions of value legible and defendable. Through analysis of designer-NPO collaborations, the thesis shows how design practice can help organisations surface their own definitions of value, stabilise them long enough to act on them, and communicate them to stakeholders — while remaining open to revision as contexts shift. The designer's role here is to create conditions for organisations to articulate what matters to them.

3. Design belongs in the everyday work of ordinary people
The research challenges assumptions about who gets to design and where design happens. Through observations of emerging and expert designers working with NPOs, the thesis reveals that many organisations are seeking support with tasks often dismissed as minor or procedural: designing a service form, preparing a visual, creating clarity for a client or funder. These are acts of design that sustain organisational life and community legibility. The research argues that design's role in social contexts is less about heroic problem-solving and more about supporting everyday social action — ordinary people trying to do their ordinary best.

THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS:
This thesis develops a critical understanding of value in relation to design praxis, drawing particularly on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, via Moi 2017).

The Discussion chapter structures its synthesis as a three-act reflection:

Act I: Philosophising Conceptualisations of Value argues that to conceptualise value in a design engagement is to make consequential decisions about what matters, to whom, and why. If these decisions are left unexamined, they risk narrowing the scope of possibility or masking embedded assumptions. The act introduces a structured tool for making the implicit explicit — surfacing and stretching a designer's assumptions early in a project before they calcify into the work.

Act II: Stabilisers and Stabilisation of Value draws attention to how value becomes anchored — and at times prematurely fixed — through design artefacts, language, and decisions. Stabilisation is rarely total; it is partial and negotiated, unfolding through artefacts that carry weight, prompt action, and shape what can be seen or said. The act considers the risks and responsibilities that come with attempting to "hold value still."

Act III: Meta-Making with/and/for Value takes a reflexive stance, examining how design practice itself becomes a site of value production. Extending Friedman's tripartite framework for Value-Sensitive Design, it introduces a fourth form — methodological investigations of value — arguing that design tools and techniques do not merely reflect values, they make them. The act invites designers to interrogate how their modes of working reveal, suppress, or reshape value, and what responsibilities they carry in doing so.

PRACTICAL TOOLS AND METHODOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Across the thesis, several conceptual tools and methodological contributions were developed:

Value Stretch Matrix (2x2): A framework for understanding how value operates across dimensions of ontological scope (singular ↔ plural) and temporal stability (fixed ↔ emergent)
Value Definition Tool: An instrument for NPOs to surface and stabilise their own definitions of value, developed and tested with NPO stakeholders
Double Helix Model: A spatial-relational framework re-interpreting designer-NPO relationships
Methodological Investigations: An extension of Value-Sensitive Design that examines how design methods are chosen and how methodological choices shape value outcomes
A value-centric pedagogical framework: Tested with emerging designers at the University of Sydney, embedding value inquiry directly into design education
Integration of ordinary language philosophy into design research practice

Cases of design engagement with NPOs

REFLECTION
This work emerged from a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to design for value in the Australian non-profit sector? Rather than offering resolution, the research sought to understand the conditions under which value becomes legible, how it is stabilised in particular moments, and what becomes possible when we attend to its multiplicity.

The thesis advocates for design work outside the dominant logics of government and market, where value is shaped by relationships and the everyday work of maintenance. It suggests that design belongs in the ordinary arrangements of organisational life – a recognition that small acts of design can have disproportionate impact in the right contexts.

A complete PDF of the thesis will soon be available through the University of Sydney library. For enquiries about the research or collaboration opportunities, please contact me via email.