October Forum Forum - Deep, Digital & Collective: Designing for Human Experience
Description
Deep, Digital & Collective Intelligence: Designing for Human Experience
Exploring tools and methods to better connect design with our experience of urban space
🕖 Time: 6:00 to 8:00 pm
📅 When: Monday, 12th of October, 2026
📍 Place: Monash College City Campus, Level 8, Room 803, 750 Collins Street, Docklands
Urban design is often shaped by what we can see, measure, and map. But some of the most important qualities of a place are felt - whether a space feels safe, comfortable, welcoming, lively, or simply enjoyable to be in.
For our October Forum Forum, Karolina Faulkner from GXN Innovation and Tim Hunt from The Night Office will explore how different tools, technologies, and ways of thinking can more precisely help us understand human experiences and translate them into better design outcomes.
This Forum Forum will facilitate a dialogue between two practices working in different ways to explore a shared question: how can we build better intelligence about the way people experience space?
Karolina and Tim will unpack a series of everyday ‘felt experiences’, including safety, belonging, comfort, activation, and delight, and explore how these experiences may be understood, observed, and responded to through design. The discussion will also explore how human experiences of places can shift in spatial perception between day and night, and what this means for how we analyse and design our urban environments.
Expect a practical and thought provoking conversation about technology-aided sensory urbanism, the tools we use to read our cities, and how a deeper understanding of human experience can inform the places we create.
We look forward to having you join us for an evening of ideas, conversation, and a different way of looking at urban design.
This venue has been generously provided by our supporters Monash University and is hosted in a recently adapted office building in a former Axa headquarters.
Note: Ticket price includes snacks and drinks.
Meet the Speakers
Karolina Faulkner - Associate, GXN Innovation
Karolina Faulkner is a trained architect and urban designer with a deep interest in architectural research, evidence-based design and creating a thriving environment for people and planet. Over the last decade, living and working across Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK and Australia, she has developed a broad perspective on different tools and methodologies we can use to understand our built environment. She is now an Associate at GXN Innovation, the research and innovation practice of 3XN Architects, where her work sits at the intersection of circular design and behavioural design. Her core belief is that the most sustainable and meaningful outcomes emerge where these two fields overlap; where materials, resources and human experience are understood together rather than in isolation.
Tim Hunt - Director, The Night Office
Tim Hunt has spent nearly two decades on a question most cities leave until last: how places work after dark, for the people using them. At Arup he built night-time design into a named global service and wrote the firm's global night-time design guidelines. Along the way he started walking cities at night with small groups, to understand why a place feels the way it does. More than 50 night walks later, that practice underpins his work. His approach is evidence-led, through research with Monash University's XYX Lab and continued community consultation. The Night Office brings night-time design, lighting design and media architecture into one practice.
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity
