At the heart of every educational or societal transformation lies a simple question: Who is being included, and how?
For over a decade, our work has explored how inclusive and equitable design, grounded in play, creativity, and co-creation, can reshape learning and community engagement across diverse contexts. From CreativeCulture in Borneo to ACES, FAiR, and I-HEDU, this journey has been about designing with people, not for them, through a transdisciplinary, challenge-based research approach that bridges education, culture, and sustainability.
The Origins: CreativeCulture and the Seeds of Inclusive Design
The AHRC-Funded CreativeCulture project began as an exploration of how playful design and cultural artefacts could enable teachers and communities to rethink how learning happens. Working with educators across Sarawak, Malaysia, we asked a fundamental question: What if play and creativity were recognised as legitimate ways of knowing and doing in education?
Through co-design workshops and community engagements, teachers and students experimented with local materials, such as recycled items, traditional games, and storytelling, to reimagine classroom experiences. This became a living example of frugal innovation in education: not defined by lack, but by resourcefulness, relevance, and agency.
The project’s success revealed that playfulness and frugality could coexist as powerful values for inclusion, especially in under-resourced contexts where formal innovation often fails to reach. CreativeCulture didn’t just produce playful tools; it nurtured a mindset of participatory creativity, where cultural identity, local context, and educational aspiration intersected.
From CreativeCulture to ACES: Scaling Co-Creation and Frugal Play
Building on the lessons from CreativeCulture, the ESRC-Funded ACES (A Community-Centred Educational Model for Developing Social Resilience) project took this ethos further. If CreativeCulture showed that playful and frugal design worked locally, ACES asked: Can this model be adapted and scaled across communities and education systems internationally?
Operating across Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, ACES invited educators and community partners to co-design STEM learning challenges using local materials and playful approaches. What emerged was a value-based framework linking playfulness, frugality, and co-creation as drivers of inclusion and resilience.
Instead of importing high-tech solutions, educators prototyped their own. Across all three countries, educators demonstrated how constraints can drive innovation. In Indonesia, activities such as the Ejection Rocket Experiment turned force and motion lessons into playful explorations, while the Simple Aesthetic Candle used recycled cooking oil and jars to teach energy transformation and sustainability. In Malaysia, the Conductor and Insulator Maze Runner transformed science into embodied play, where students navigated a handmade maze built from recycled cardboard and buzzers to test electrical conductivity, while the Fish Intestines Compost Block linked biology with community waste management through eco-conscious design. In Vietnam, projects like Mini Water Filtering Tools and Muong’s Language Lesson merged environmental education and cultural preservation, encouraging learners to prototype solutions and celebrate indigenous identity through playful collaboration.
ACES validated a critical insight: inclusive equitable design is as much about values as it is about methods. By embedding curiosity, creativity, and local wisdom into design, educators redefined what innovation looks like in their own classrooms and communities.
FAiR: Extending Playful and Frugal Design into the Arts
The AHRC-Funded Frugal Artist-in-Residence (FAiR) initiative extended this design philosophy into the creative and environmental domains. Where CreativeCulture worked with teachers and ACES with educators across STEM disciplines, FAiR engaged artists and communities to explore how art, science, and play can collaborate to address complex challenges such as climate change and environmental storytelling.
Through residencies, exhibitions, and co-created public installations, FAiR demonstrated that the same principles, frugality, playfulness, and inclusivity, can empower communities to express their voices and advocate for sustainability. In projects like the Pasir Pandak mural and sculpture initiative in Sarawak, art became a shared language for collective awareness and action.
I-HEDU: Inclusion in Higher Education
The British Council-Funded I-HEDU (Indonesia Higher Education Disability Union) project brings these insights full circle, focusing on inclusion within the university system. Drawing on the participatory and empathic design methods first piloted in CreativeCulture and refined through ACES, I-HEDU examines how disabled students experience campus life and how institutions can reimagine policies, learning spaces, and digital accessibility.
Once again, the approach is transdisciplinary and challenge-based, bringing together educators, designers, students, and policymakers to prototype inclusive solutions that address structural inequities in higher education. I-HEDU shows that the same playful, empathic, and co-creative mindset that transforms schools and communities can also reshape universities.
A Transdisciplinary and Challenge-Based Principle
Across these initiatives, a clear research philosophy has emerged:
- Transdisciplinarity connects education, art, culture, design, and technology.
- Challenge-based research grounds innovation in real-world contexts and lived experiences.
- Frugal and playful design ensures accessibility and agency, empowering local actors to lead change.
This is not a linear pipeline but an evolving ecosystem, where each project informs and enriches the others. CreativeCulture laid the foundation; ACES scaled the approach; FAiR extended it to creative activism; and I-HEDU applied it to disability inclusion and higher education transformation.
Towards Equitable Futures
These interconnected projects demonstrate that inclusive equitable design is not about creating perfect systems but about building adaptable, participatory, and context-sensitive ones. The impact is visible in teachers redesigning learning experiences, artists engaging communities in environmental dialogue, and universities rethinking inclusion.
At its core, this body of work challenges the notion that innovation requires privilege or technology. Instead, it proposes a more human and sustainable vision; one where creativity and inclusion are inseparable, and where play becomes both a method and a metaphor for how we design, learn, and live together.
Sylvester Arnab 