Associate Professor Mark Ian Jones

I am a design historian, Chartered Architect and educational leader. Rather than three separate careers, these have provided different contexts for the same inquiry: how design and institutions shape the way people come to understand and engage with ideas, places and practices.

My architectural practice first showed me that design is not simply the production of objects, but the shaping of relationships between people and place, aspiration and everyday life. Architecture also taught me to think across scales, understanding how individual elements contribute to the coherence and experience of the whole. This relational view of design has continued to inform both my research and my educational leadership. I also continue to practise as principal of Jones Architecture, a Sydney-based studio established in 1995.

My doctoral research, funded by a Swedish Institute Guest Scholarship (2008–2011) and undertaken as a Guest Researcher at Uppsala University, began as a study of a single Swedish designer and became something broader: an investigation into how museums, exhibitions, manufacturers and critics construct the narratives that come to dominate design history. Supported by Swedish cultural foundations and the Royal Household, it resulted in the monograph Vicke Lindstrand: On the Periphery, Mid-Twentieth Century Swedish Design and the Reception of Vicke Lindstrand (Uppsala University Press, 2016). It showed that such processes are never neutral: they illuminate some histories while obscuring others, with consequences that outlast the intentions of those who shaped them. 

This perspective has guided my subsequent research into the transnational circulation of design ideas and their interpretation within Australia. Across studies of Nordic and Italian design, prefabricated housing, exhibitions and cultural diplomacy, I examine how design travels through networks of people, objects and institutions, and how it is adapted and transformed within new cultural contexts. A parallel concern has been recovering designers and histories that have been marginalised or obscured by dominant narratives, giving greater visibility to the people and relationships through which design cultures are formed. 

This continuing program of research included a Powerhouse Museum Visiting Research Fellowship (2022–2023) and now extends through my role as Lead Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Linkage Project Transforming Australian Design Cultures Through the Department Store, 1954–75 (2027–2029), undertaken with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse Museum), the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the University of Technology Sydney. The project examines how department stores, particularly David Jones, mediated international design ideas and emerging cultural identities in postwar Australia, not as neutral distributors of goods, but as active shapers of taste and aspiration. 

I bring this same perspective to my work in higher education. As Deputy Academic Lead, Student Experience Program, within the UNSW Pro Vice-Chancellor Education portfolio, I co-lead institution-wide work in curriculum transformation, assessment reform and AI-enabled learning. I often draw on architecture as an analogy for curriculum design: just as a building cannot be understood as a collection of independently designed rooms, a program cannot be understood as a collection of individual courses. Both require attention to relationships, sequence, coherence and the experience of the whole.

I therefore approach curriculum and assessment not simply as policy implementation or educational technology, but as questions of institutional design. How do assessment frameworks shape learning, and what forms of judgement do they encourage? What capabilities become visible, and which remain hidden? These questions have become more pressing as artificial intelligence unsettles longstanding assumptions about knowledge, expertise and professional practice. I have previously held several senior leadership roles at UNSW, including Nexus Fellow (2024–25), Director Education Innovation in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture (2021), and Deputy Head of School (Design), Faculty of Art & Design (2016–21).

My collaborations with museums, galleries and cultural institutions in Australia and internationally have extended my research beyond the archive, testing and enriching its arguments through exhibitions, fellowships and public programs that themselves mediate design history for new audiences. Invited lectures and keynotes for museums, universities, embassies and cultural organisations, including presentations through the Swedish and Australian embassies, have carried this research into contemporary diplomatic and cultural contexts, where the same questions of design diplomacy and transnational exchange remain live.

I no longer see architecture, design history and educational leadership as separate chapters. They are different expressions of a continuing intellectual project: understanding the relationship between design and institutions, the consequences of the choices they embody, and how thoughtful design might create more coherent and meaningful ways for people to experience, learn and act.