Ilianna Ginnis

Ilianna Ginnis is an interior architectural designer and a current PhD Candidate within the Design Health Collab at Monash University. Ilianna is also a caregiver for persons with disabilities as well as an allied health assistant to speech pathologists. Ilianna prides herself on designing with consciousness, creating interventions that extend the ordinary intentions of architecture, multi-disciplinary as well as sensory design for people with neurodevelopmental disabilities, focusing on communication, specifically behavioural and non-verbal, to stimulate design processes. Her aim is to achieve empathy through the exploration of interior architecture with a fundamental focus on intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability. Her PhD speculates on how design processes begin to consider persons with severe and profound intellectual disability and non-verbal communication, allowing designers to integrate users into complex processes as narrators of their own experience.

Wominjeka (Welcome). We acknowledge the Yaluk-ut Weelam as the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet. Yaluk-ut Weelam means ‘people of the river camp’ and is connected with the coastal land at the head of Port Phillip Bay, extending from the Werribee River to Mordialloc. The Yaluk-ut Weelam are part of the Boon Wurrung, one of the five major language groups of the greater Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to the land, their ancestors and their elders—past, present and to the future.