Transmediating Complexity: SWISP’s Distraction Living Lab Residency 

SWISP Lab (Kathryn Coleman, Sacha Healy, Yvette Walker and Cassie Truong) 

We ask: How might curriculum become a living inquiry for youth voice and critical attention in a time of distraction? 

Associate Professor Kathryn Coleman and SWISP Lab doctoral candidates Stephen Nicholls and Cassandra Truong welcome Vice-Chancellor, Professor Emma Johnston AO and Dean, Faculty of Education, Professor Marek Tesar to SWISP Lab’s DISTRACTION residency.

Insights from our living-lab at Science Gallery Melbourne, include how creative pedagogies for climate action can reframe the gallery/museum as a curriculum in motion and as a space of civic imagination, collective care, and speculative making.

What does our living-lab look like in Science Gallery?

In the living lab we activate the concept of playful distraction as critical attention through our HAK.io (Hacking the Anthropocene Kit – input output) methods. We craft creative climate education where distraction isn’t dismissed but redirected, reinterpreted, and retooled as a generative force for learning, care, and wondering-with.

This occurs relationally amidst climate collapse and post-digital overwhelm – simultaneously an affecting absence and presence. 

Working with young people (14–29), we co-create game-based, embodied, and story-driven inquiries that find form in zines, emoji data, wondering walks, and travelling collages to transform overwhelm into speculative imagination. Rather than disciplining distraction, these methods disrupt the productivity paradigm, opening portals to radical attention that is playful, poetic, and politically potent. In doing so, distraction becomes a pedagogy of resistance or an invitation to slow down, notice differently, question normative values, and stay with the trouble of planetary change. 

A civics orientated art education that care-fully shapes a young person’s sense of self in relation to the world relies on collective work. This includes a shared responsibility across sites, between classrooms, institutions and GLAM sector communities. We discuss how teachers might translate these approaches into classrooms, studios, and communities, cultivating affective, ethical, and ecological capacities for living and learning otherwise. Ultimately, we propose that curriculum itself can become a shared living inquiry, a site where attention, imagination, and responsibility intertwine and where art education helps us not only to witness the world, but to re-world it together. 

We’ll be talking about our living lab at Science Gallery Melbourne at NVAEC26 and inviting teachers, artists and NVAEC26 participants who join us to post and archive their wondering walks here.

Team bio: SWISP Lab is a living research collective led by artist-educators and researchers Dr. Kathryn Coleman, Dr. Sacha Healy, Yvette Walker and Cassie Truong. Together we explore how speculative, arts-based, and relational pedagogies can reimagine education for complex times. Working across classrooms, museums, and community spaces, SWISP Lab collaborates with young people (14–29), teachers, and cultural partners to design creative inquiries into climate futures, distraction, and care. Our projects such as HAK.io (Hacking the Anthropocene Kit) and the Science Gallery Melbourne Distraction Living Lab (2025–26) reframe art education as a practice of attention, attunement, and imagination. We create playful methods such as zines, games, wondering walks, emoji data, and travelling collages that help participants story complexity, sense interconnection, and speculate otherwise. At SWISP, we ask: What if learning were a form of world-making? Our work sits at the intersections of sustainability, creativity, and civic responsibility, where education becomes a space for radical imagination, collective care, and reworlding.