Paper Giant

12/10/2026

Our work with the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) has won a 2026 Australian Good Design Award for Design Strategy. TAC staff were getting lots of emails but still found it hard to find what they needed. The internal communications team was so busy with last-minute requests that its own strategy kept slipping. We spoke with more than 70 people across TAC and found that the same person plays different roles at different times, like sharing information or acting on it.

We built the strategy around these roles, instead of where people sit in the organisation. Then we coached the team as they put it into practice, rather than handing over a document and walking away. The jury called this a "thoughtful and empowering approach" to change. The team now runs its own 90-day planning and has a stronger voice with TAC's leaders.

Read More: https://papergiant.net/work/tac-internal-communications-strategy
Jury’s Comment in Full: https://papergiant.net/news/four-2026-australian-good-design-awards

07/10/2026

Our work with The Sexual Assault and Family Violence Centre (SAFV) has won a 2026 Australian Good Design Award for Social Impact. SAFV supports victim-survivors across the Barwon and Wimmera regions of Victoria, and wanted to hear directly from the people it helps. We planned every step with SAFV staff so the research was safe first. We then spoke with 14 clients, who later came back to check and shape what we made.

Together, we made a map of the client journey, six personas and a new tool that shows how parts of a person's identity overlap. The jury praised the project's "exceptional care" and how it puts the voices of victim-survivors at the centre. They also noted that the tool is now part of SAFV's everyday work. Thank you to SAFV and to every client who trusted us with their story.

Read More: https://papergiant.net/work/safv-client-journey-mapping
Jury’s Comment in Full: https://papergiant.net/news/four-2026-australian-good-design-awards

06/10/2026

Four of our projects have won 2026 Australian Good Design Awards.

The awards recognise work with The Sexual Assault and Family Violence Centre (Social Impact), the Transport Accident Commission and the State Electricity Commission (both Design Strategy), and the Department of Transport and Planning (Design Research). Swipe through for each project and what the jury said about it.

Each project depended on a client who wanted to hear from the people their service is for, and on the people who gave their time to tell us. Thank you to all of them.

The case studies:
The Sexual Assault and Family Violence Centre: https://papergiant.net/work/safv-client-journey-mapping
Transport Accident Commission: https://papergiant.net/work/tac-internal-communications-strategy
State Electricity Commission: https://papergiant.net/work/mapping-victorias-energy-future-through-consumer-participation
Department of Transport and Planning: https://papergiant.net/work/dtp-myki-accessible-fare-validators

The jury's comments in full: https://papergiant.net/news/four-2026-australian-good-design-awards

01/10/2026

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29/09/2026

How do you get a community talking about something as complex as facial recognition? You let them experience it. Working with the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion, we co-designed an interactive application that puts speculative facial recognition scenarios directly in people's hands. Rather than lecturing about risk, it invites people to feel the trade-offs of access control and surveillance for themselves, turning an abstract policy issue into a shared conversation.

The project did double duty: one version supported focus groups with rich, privacy-protective interaction data for researchers, while a second brought the experience to the public at Vivid Sydney 2022, complete with a digital souvenir for participants. Together, they're feeding directly into a proposed model law for facial recognition in Australia, showing how good design can shape not just how people understand a technology, but how it might be governed.

→ Read the full case study. https://papergiant.net/work/enabling-conversations-about-the-ethics-of-facial-recognition-technology

University of Technology Sydney. We worked with the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion on an application that the public can...

24/09/2026

What does self-determination look like when the stories being told about your culture are someone else's? Partnering with researchers from RMIT and The University of Melbourne, we spent time with Wiradjuri community members in Central NSW, who spoke openly of "dreamtime fatigue" and scepticism toward tools that reduce culture to fixed, ancient narratives. That conversation reshaped our entire approach to the project.

Rather than documenting a single version of Wiradjuri identity, we co-designed a community storytelling tool, hosted on country, that holds space for multiple, sometimes contested, perspectives on what it means to be Wiradjuri today. Filmed oral histories, community-led interpretation and layered video annotation let people tell their own truths, side by side. The work was later presented at the Designing Interactive Systems conference in 2016.

Full case study: https://papergiant.net/work/exploring-indigenous-identity-through-design

RMIT and The University of Melbourne. We partnered with researchers from RMIT and The University of Melbourne to co-design digital tools...

22/09/2026

Cities across the Mekong are going digital fast, but the picture of who's leading that shift, and where the gaps are, has been hard to see. For the Department of Home Affairs, we set out to map who's shaping smart cities and critical technology across Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and where Australia could usefully help. Drawing on eight expert interviews and wide regional reading, we built five stakeholder maps and a 17-point scorecard to compare how ready each country is.

The result is a shared, evidence-based view the Department can bring into conversations with partners across the region. It points to three focus areas, from stronger cyber security foundations to digital identity, and matches each to practical ways Australia can work alongside these countries rather than around them. The research is now shaping two proposed Australian aid programs for safer smart cities in the Mekong.

Read more: https://papergiant.net/work/home-affairs-critical-technology-mekong

How Paper Giant helped the Department of Home Affairs understand who shapes smart cities and cyber security in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

17/09/2026

Technology decisions are easier to make than they are to unmake, which is why we start with strategy, not the tool. Our Digital & AI practice helps organisations work through digital transformation and emerging technology, from strategy through to product design and development, always with a human-centred lens. That means understanding your context and capabilities before reaching for a solution, and testing ideas early with the people who'll actually use them.

Our AI work follows the same logic. We focus on practical, agentic applications, but we design systems that augment human judgment rather than replace it, with ethics, privacy, and bias considered from the start, not bolted on at the end. Our redesign of Bank Australia's website is one example of this approach in action, bringing strategy and design together to better express what the bank stands for.

Check out what we can offer and our recent case studies.
https://papergiant.net/services/digital-ai

Digital product design, AI strategy and responsible technology consulting. Paper Giant helps organisations build digital services that work for people.

15/09/2026

"Data sovereignty" gets used to mean three different things, and most services only ever answer one of them. Whose laws reach the data? Who can actually move it or switch it off? And who decides how data about a community or place gets used? Australia's Privacy Act was written in 1988, before the cloud, before Optus and Medibank, before AI data centres started asking Traditional Owners for a seat at the table and services are left answering all three questions, whether they mean to or not.

The gap between these three shows up in real places: a department that keeps every byte onshore but never asks who has authority over data about a community; a consent screen that ticks the legal box but earns none of the trust. In this piece, we walk through what's changing (the 72-hour breach rule, the "fair and reasonable" test, the fight over data centres on Country) and six practical starting points for teams who don't want to wait for the bill to pass.

Read the full article. https://papergiant.net/news/whose-data-whose-rules-data-sovereignty-in-australia

A plain-language guide to what data sovereignty means in Australia: whose laws apply, who holds the keys, and who decides how data about a people or place is used.

10/09/2026

For some organisations, it's a quick export. For others, it means digging through years of disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and forgotten databases to answer a simple question. The gap between those two answers says a lot about how well a service actually respects the people it's built for. Data transparency isn't just a compliance checkbox; it's a design problem and a trust one.

We think this is a useful test for any team to run on their own service. If the answer isn't "quickly and clearly," that's worth sitting with.