Australia is designed every day. It’s time we counted the people behind it.

Every day, Australians live and interact with thousands of examples of design, from the clothes they wear and the homes and workplaces they inhabit to the products, services and systems that shape almost every moment of contemporary life.

While design is woven into everyday life, the profession behind it remains remarkably invisible. “For more than 80 years, the Design Institute of Australia has advocated for the value of design because we know the impact it has on Australia’s economy, society and culture,” said Simone LeAmon, CEO of the Design Institute of Australia.

Now, ahead of Census Night on Tuesday 11 August 2026, the nation’s peak body is asking designers across the country to help create the clearest picture yet of Australia’s design profession.

Despite contributing an estimated $67.5 billion to the Australian economy each year, Australia still does not have an accurate picture of how many design professionals contribute to the Australian workforce. For decades, the profession has been inadequately measured, making it harder to demonstrate the true scale of its workforce and its contribution to government and the nation.

The 2026 Census presents a watershed opportunity for Australia’s design profession. For the first time, Census data will be coded under the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ new Occupation Standard Classification (OSCA) framework, establishing the first national benchmark of the design workforce within its own dedicated occupational group: 242 Design Professionals.

With Census Night less than a month away, the DIA has launched Write DESIGNER, a national advocacy campaign to help designers accurately record their profession to ensure the contribution of Australia’s design workforce is properly counted.

At the heart of the campaign is a landmark creative collaboration initiated by the DIA and brought to life by Clemenger BBDO, ARIA Award-winning artist N’fa Jones, composer Jonah Gabriel, and many of Australia’s leading designers, studios and businesses, all contributing their talents to make the nation’s design profession visible.

“We’re surrounded by proof of what designers make possible, yet the people behind that work have remained largely invisible,” notes Clemenger BBDO Executive Creative Director Giles Watson.

“Designers prove you can’ celebrates a profession built on challenging assumptions, solving problems and turning limitations into possibilities, and this year’s census is a chance for the industry to come together, be counted and finally make the scale of that contribution visible.”

Featuring projects by internationally acclaimed designer Marc Newson, fashion house Romance Was Born, PACCAR Australia for Kenworth trucks, Ludo Studio behind Bluey, RØDE Microphones, Blackmagic Design, Balarinji, Blanche Tilden, Carr and many others, the campaign brings together an extraordinary breadth of Australian design, from medical devices and consumer products to fashion, visual communications, service design, transportation, interiors and public infrastructure.

Together, these works reveal how designers help us hear, see, breathe, move, communicate, belong, imagine and make. In a world where we’re too often told we can’t, the campaign offers a simple answer: designers prove you can. “Write DESIGNER is more than a campaign, it’s a collective act of advocacy for Australia’s design profession” said Simone LeAmon, CEO of the Design Institute of Australia.

Every day, designers challenge assumptions, solve complex problems, create value and transform ‘you can’t into ‘you can’.”

“This campaign is about uniting an entire profession around a single moment that only comes once every five years. By ensuring designers are accurately counted in the Census, we’re building the evidence needed to strengthen advocacy, inform decision-making, government policy and secure greater recognition for design into the future.”

On Census Night, the DIA is encouraging every designer to identify themselves by their specific design profession when answering the question, “What is the person’s occupation?” Wherever possible, designers should use a recognised design occupation within the OSCA group 242 Design Professionals, including Graphic Designer, Industrial Designer, Interior Designer, Jewellery Designer, Fashion Designer, Multimedia Designer, UI/UX Designer, Web Designer, Textile Designer, Animator, VFX Artist or Illustrator.

A full list of recognised design occupations and alternative titles is available on the OSCA website and will be published on the DIA’s Write DESIGNER campaign page.

Importantly, the ABS assesses both a person’s occupation and the tasks they perform. In the tasks section, designers should begin with “Designing…” and describe what they design—for example, “Designing brand identities and visual communications.”

This helps ensure their occupation is accurately classified. “On 11 August, we have the opportunity to make history and create the most accurate picture of Australia’s design profession, said Simone LeAmon, CEO of the Design Institute of Australia.

We’re asking every designer to answer with the profession they’ve worked so hard to build. The Write DESIGNER campaign launches nationally on 14 July ahead of Census Night on Tuesday 11 August 2026, supported by a campaign film, practical guidance, and occupation examples online to help designers accurately identify their profession when completing the Census.

More information on the WRITE DESIGNER Campaign on the DIA website HERE.

A Guide to Symbiocene Design is available to download now from the Symbiocene Institute. 

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Far beyond simply reducing harm, design has the potential to do good and create immeasurable positive impact. Good Design Australia has been working with the Symbiocene Institute and Vert Industrial Design to develop the recently launched design guide titled – A Guide to Symbiocene Design.

The guide draws on the work of Glenn Albrecht, who first set out the Symbiocene in his book, Earth Emotions, and offers a practical approach to help designers and decision-makers reconcile human needs and desires with the wellbeing of all life.

The Symbiocene proposes a shift away from the Anthropocene – an era defined by humanity’s domination of nature – towards a future grounded in symbiosis, where humans are guardians of the natural world. 

This emerging movement shaped A Guide to Symbiocene Design, which outlines nine guiding principles for Symbiocene-compatible design. These principles are supported by 50 real-world examples from around the globe, as well as new design concepts that imagine non-human clients like bees, frogs and kookaburras. Together, they show what partnering with nature looks like in practice. 

We spoke with Andy Marks, Founder and Executive Director of the Symbiocene Institute, about the guide, the approach behind it and how designers can be pathfinders to a better future.

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GDA: The Symbiocene began in environmental philosophy with Glenn Albrecht’s book, Earth Emotions. Why is design the right discipline to carry it forward today?

Andy Marks: We are at a really challenging and interesting time. People call it the Anthropocene, a destructive time caused by humans. 

Humankind’s appetite, desires and needs are out of line with the ability of the planet to sustain life. We’re facing multiple crises. 

We need to shift our field of vision, raise our ambition and use innovation to help guide us out of the mess we’re in.

For us, design is quite a broad church around processes that are solving complex problems. Designers are key to that, as disciplines that create new things, put new things into the world, create new processes, and shape the world around us.

So what we would like to do with this guide is look at some really great, bold, ambitious, and practically achievable destinations we can get to and have designers be the guides to that better future.

Image: Symbiocene Institute

GDA: What role does A Guide to Symbiocene Design play in the wider Symbiocene movement?

Andy Marks: The Symbiocene proposes that a shift is needed from dominating nature to working in partnership with it. The guide helps people understand how to see nature as a partner, how to draw from nature without depleting it.

The Symbiocene is an emerging global movement. Around the world, the people who are leading on it are designers, architects, engineers as well as artists. 

One of the roles of  the guide is to reflect this and that the Symbiocene Institute is a hub for this global movement, supporting design now and into the future.

GDA: A Guide to Symbiocene Design arrives at a time when designers already have frameworks like circular economy and regenerative design. What does Symbiocene design add to that toolkit?

Andy Marks: We understand and recognise that there’s a lot of good work being done. There’s also a lot of aspiration out there that isn’t being realised.

Symbiocene design works as an umbrella for a lot of really promising and impactful approaches, including circularity, nature-positive, biophilia, biomimicry and regenerative design. 

[Symbiocene design] brings those approaches together and anchors them in what our core belief is: we need to create, or reinforce, mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships with nature.

The approach allows people to multi-solve, to move beyond using a single lens to optimise, which in many instances is profit, often at the expense of nature.

We’re offering a way of analysing problems that designers are trying to solve. A way for designers to look not just at economic benefits, but also environmental, social and cultural benefits. 

This helps people understand that their approach can have positive impacts. Not just go from bad to less bad incrementally, but to create positive outcomes through design.

Image: Symbiocene Institute

GDA: The guide was developed in partnership with Good Design Australia and Vert Industrial Design. What did each partner bring to the work?

Andy Marks: The guide has been a process of collaboration over around a 12-month period with our key partners, Good Design Australia and Vert Industrial Design. 

It was both a structured and a fluid process in terms of what the different partners could contribute. The partners helped us look at the Symbiocene guiding principles, to explore them,, shape them and see how they can be practically applied.

Vert Industrial Design leaned into their strength in terms of design process and contributed an awful lot throughout, including nine new design concept provocations on how to design in partnership with nature.

Good Design Australia brought a wider understanding of the design world. They helped ensure we were anchored in the practical challenges that designers face. They also helped us understand the wider design landscape – from industrial design and the built environment to policy design, systems and service innovation.

GDA: Why is it important for designers to understand what reconciling human needs and desires with the wellbeing of all life looks like in practice?

Andy Marks: Reconciling human needs and desires with the wellbeing of all life is really the key for this. The way we offer the opportunity for designers to do that is to frame it in something that is both simple yet has complexities. 

At its most simple, we use the scientific principle of symbiosis, a foundation for all life. All life on earth is reliant upon relationships with other organisms and natural systems. 

This is something that First Nations peoples around the world have always known – that you are in relation to the natural world and need to work at creating partnerships with nature to help ensure life flourishes.

We’re saying to designers here is a way of seeing, here’s a way of thinking and here’s a way of acting.

Symbiosis offers a relational view of the world, a two-way view. It’s rooted in science and it also offers a more emotional component – head, heart and hope.

[The head] offers us a way to see the world and understand that we’re all connected and we’re all dependent upon the natural systems that support life.

[The heart] is the feeling we have that we’re part of something bigger interconnected with nature.

[And the hope] is the Symbiocene as a positive vision of the future, with practical ways to get there. We’re showing what that future could look like.

Hope is absolutely key for people. We need hope that is rooted in practical applications. It’s something the late Joanna Macy calls active hope. It’s not just hoping somebody else will do it, but giving people ways of acting on that hope.

The guide is rich with examples and concepts so that designers can see how the Symbiocene design principles can be applied and be inspired to ask, ‘what’s our version of that?’ We can see pathways through these crises. We can contribute. We have agency. We have the tools. We have methodologies. We have examples. We have inspiration. And therefore we can be more motivated to act and engage our networks and our communities.

GDA: Good Design Australia’s theme for the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards is ‘Design that Leads.’ Why is it important that designers lead the shift to the Symbiocene rather than wait for policy or industry to catch up?

Andy Marks: Designers play a really important role in shaping the world. They are people that understand process,the need for depth in process and to understand the impacts of process.

They create new things. They put new ideas into the world. They point to new directions. They show what is possible and what good can look like and they’re always looking to go beyond, to go better than what they did last time.

Designers are on paths of continual improvement. They’re also very receptive to influences, to soak up what’s going on in the world around them. They have a great perspective to see how change is happening and where change can happen.

At the Symbiocene Institute, we believe everybody needs to play a part. If policy makers see what designers are trying  to do, aspiring to do and successfully doing, then they will respond to that. 

So designers are catalysts.

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The decisions made by designers today shape what gets created, protected and made possible tomorrow. A Guide to Symbiocene Design offers a way to make those decisions in partnership with nature, for a thriving future. 

A Guide to Symbiocene Design is available to download now from the Symbiocene Institute.