UNSW academic crosses the boundaries between practice, education and research in genre-busting design projects
Published on 8 December 2025
Senior Lecturer Eva Lloyd has always been fascinated by the intersection of art and society. To her, it was thus a natural step to study interior architecture and then architecture. “I was attracted to the field because I enjoyed creative exploration and liked being able to grapple with societal challenges whilst exploring the intimate relationships between people and their environments.”
Once she got involved in the field, she noticed something that got her thinking. “The separate disciplines in which we were taught were not so siloed in practice. Moving from Australia to Southeast Asia, I was excited by opportunities to work across interiors, urban design, landscape and architecture whilst collaborating with economists, engineers, human rights lawyers and activists. I began to understand the intersections of these fields through community-centred projects in affordable housing, land tenure advocacy, and public amenity.”
Eva considers the boundaries between practice, education and research to be porous. “As an academic, I find it really hard to say, ‘This is research and this is education and this is service.’ I frame my work with communities through the lens of all of these fields and I am building increasing confidence to say, ‘Hey, this is actually a valid way of working as an academic.’”
Some of the major projects Eva has been working on reflect her fascination with this nexus of design practice, education and community. For example, over the past 10 years she has been working with artists, students and residents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia through the Street Life Studies course. Her collaborative work with co-convenor Vuth Lyno and the Royal University of Fine Arts, seeks to recognise the “everyday” design intelligence that local residents demonstrate in shaping robust and convivial neighbourhoods, amidst a history of significant political challenges. Students from Australia and Cambodia work with residents to understand the patterns of daily socio-spatial life on neighbourhood streets, the ways residents have adapted to challenges, and their evolving needs and aspirations. Through the annual three-month Professional Placement course, students and residents have now responded to some of those needs, co-creating a street mural that tells stories of an often-overlooked neighbourhood, a mobile library, and a program of monthly activities to support youth voice in the neighbourhood.
Collaboration with Built Environment colleague Dr Jayde Roberts has supported the expansion of these educational activities into an invited role within a five-year research project involving 13 institutions and community groups across Southeast Asia, which explores residents’ autonomy in tactical city-making and the lessons it offers for fostering more just and resilient urban planning.
In another project, Eva has come together with fellow Education-Focussed academic Dr. Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard to engage students in reimagining outdoor terraces at the Royal Hospital for Women as greener, cooler, more biodiverse and more restorative spaces that improve health outcomes for staff. The project is a UNSW cross-faculty project, initiated by the Global Water Institute, that engages the faculties of Medicine and Health, Engineering, and Art, Design and Architecture. Built Environment students work with an industry partner, the Indigenous-owned and operated design consultancy Yerrabingin, to ensure that Country and Indigenous knowledges are at the heart of the project. In 2024, this saw the generation of a concept plan for phase 1 of the project, with students involved in a range of co-design workshops that included hospital staff and community members, led by Yerrabingin.
Ms Lloyd and her students are also collaborating with the UNSW Global Water Institute and a broad network of community, academic, and industry partners in far western New South Wales. For the fourth year now, landscape architecture students have spent 10-weeks in Ngemba-Baakindji Country (Bourke)contributing to the development of the Brave Space Garden and the Bourke Community Garden, with nutrition and occupational therapy students from the University of Sydney.
The projects explore how community gardens - and community-led approaches - can support better nutritional, employment, educational, environmental and social outcomes with and for Aboriginal people in Bourke.
Students collaborate with a team that includes the Bourke High School Wellbeing unit, the Bourke Aboriginal Corporation Health Service, the Regional Enterprise Development Institute and the Botanic Gardens Community Greening program. They have been involved in a range of activities including workshops setting up DIY wicking beds that decrease water usage, turning carp from the river into compost, and co-designing spaces of refuge for students and community members.
Community-Based Practice
These diverse projects have a common thread, says Ms Lloyd. “I usually frame the string connecting them all as community-based practice. I use the word ‘community’ in reference to people on the ground, those with lived experience, informal and grassroots groups, and NGOs who support [them].
These projects work well when they are driven by community-determined needs, are foregrounded by a commitment to sustained and adaptable relationships, and when there is a genuine coming together of diverse forms of knowledge to tackle what are often complex and multifaceted challenges.
My colleagues and I value ongoing dialogue with peers and are increasingly working to frame this kind of practice to strategic leaders – that might be to city policy makers, boards of hospitals, academic executives. We are trying to be in conversation so that this way of working can be understood and supported as opposed to sitting on the fringes.”
She adds that in pedagogy today this kind of situated teaching practice sometimes sits within the realm of work-integrated learning. In the field of built environment, community-based work-integrated learning has opened alternative pathways for students in what has typically been an area dominated by commercial design opportunities.
The potential for community-based work integrated learning is significant: “At the beginning of my education practice in this field, in Phnom Penh, we involved students as observers, out observing life on the streets. But over the last 10 years, we’ve tried to involve students more actively in really becoming a part of the street life, a part of the neighbourhood, a part of the community rather than detached from it. As a result, the teaching and learning experience is a bit ‘wilder’. Observation is easier to control. You guide the students [by saying], ‘Look at this, this, this, this and this’.
As a part of the street or the neighbourhood, students are now being taught by community members and are running interviews, workshops and local events with residents on the streets. The approach is much more emergent, and what my colleagues and I have appreciated is that this has enriched and deepened the learning.
It has built stronger relationships between students and community members and given students the confidence to find their own way – making them feel more engaged and excited about what they are doing.”
This article was written by Laura E. Goodin.