Design / Research / Strategy
email: tristan@relativecreative.com.au
Geography: Living on Kombumerri Country in the Yugambeh language region of the wider Bundjalung Nation on the Gold Coast, Australia. Logging a footprint around the world which I am trying to justify with powerful work.
Practice: Relative Creative
Twitter handle: @TristanSchultz
I am a designer, researcher and strategist of Gamilaroi and Australian-european descent living and working from Jellurgal (Burleigh Heads, Gold Coast). I have a Bachelor of Design, Masters of Design Futures (hons) and a PhD in Design and am an Honorary Adjunct Fellow at the UTS and Honorary Fellow RMIT. I am the founder and director of Relative Creative, one of Australia’s leading strategic design studios where my research and practice in critical design, futures thinking, decolonial thinking and sustainable transitions cuts across academic, commercial, non-commercial and government settings. My practice combines product design, visual communication design, service design and systemic design, participatory design, experience, events, placemaking and interpretive design.
A bit more about my practice, Relative Creative
I am founder and Director of Relative Creative, a design, arts and strategic consultancy and creative practice. We are squarely focussed on thinking, talking and mobilising sustainable futures. We are experts in design-led facilitation of conversations around social complexities of communities and societies’ relation with work, leisure and everyday life amidst rapid change. We work with multiple disciplines inside and outside the field of design. Projects might examine the relational complexity linking issues like population growth, resource stress, climate change and its diverse impacts, geopolitical reconfiguration, global food security, actual and projected asymmetrical conflicts, global inequity, hyper-consumption, colonialism and more. It can be understood as design as situation facilitation; service design, policy, planning design and strategic design; social design; social innovation and activation design; participatory design and co-design; social enterprise design and design writing at any given time. We combine this with working creatively across visual communication design, product design, fashion design, interior design, event and exhibition design, film and production, print design, web design, information design, interactive media design, publication design, typographic design, branding and marketing, advertising and campaigns, environmental graphics design, psycho-social and psycho-geographic mapping and urban space activation and more.
Academic Appointments
2019-onwards – Honorary Adjunct Fellow RMIT
2019-onwards – Honorary Adjunct Fellow University Technology Sydney
Mid 2012 – Dec 2019: Lecturer & Convenor, Design Futures, QCA, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Education
PhD Design, Queensland College of Art – Griffith University South Bank, Brisbane – 2019
Master of Design Futures with Honours, Queensland College of Art – Griffith University South Bank, Brisbane – 2013
Bachelor of Design, awarded academic excellence, Queensland College of Art – Griffith University Gold Coast. Major in Product and 3D Design – 2006
This a running log of select activities of Tristan Schultz.
If you want to know more about any of below, and can’t find the links online (most often summaries are found at relativecreative.com.au), please drop me a line.