The UTS students were from various disciplines at the School of Design, including Visual Communication, Fashion and Textile Design and Product Design. Students from the UTS Business School were also among the group.

The Indonesian team was made up of a range of stakeholders from industry and government. UTS students were welcomed by Banjarmasin’s mayor at the town hall, and were supported by local and provincial level government officials, including from the Department of Health and the Department of Tourism.

A campaign team from Vital Strategies travelled from Jakarta and Manila to provide a regional perspective. And a range of local youth based collectives, such as Smoke Free Agents and Banjarmasin Without Smoking (Banjarmasin Tanpa Rokok) brought their ongoing campaigns such as ‘They lie, we die’ into the project.

By approaching tobacco as a ‘wicked problem’, students applied their skills to an important and wide-reaching public health issue in Indonesia, while building a deep cultural understanding of Australia’s closest neighbour. Students were supported to work in collaborative, practical, and research-based ways, designing public outcomes that were launched in a festival on the 19th and 20th of January.

Amongst the work produced, students responded to the prolific use of WhatsApp chatting in Indonesia by designing a public billboard celebrating the reasons young people chose not to smoke. Others designed a workshop to paint new hats for local acil-acil, the women who sell tropical fruit at Banjarmasin’s floating markets. Students also collaborated on short films that were screened in a public square and online. One group of students painted a mural titled ‘Lungs as Wings’ presenting a positive health message to their peers in Banjarmasin.

This Global Studio is lead by design lecturers Dr Alexandra Crosby and Jessica Lea Dunn. Students were funded through the New Columbo Plan.