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Dr Charlotte Kessler is a transdisciplinary Design Researcher and Lecturer in Design. She sees design as a powerful change-making tool relevant to addressing complex issues, and applicable across a variety of contexts.

Charlotte holds a Bachelor & Master in Product & Service Design (ENSAAMA & Ecole Boulle, France), a Master in Design Futures (Griffith University), and a PHD (Queensland University of Technology) completed in 2022. Her thesis, Developing curricula that equip designers with capabilities to enact sustainable futures: A matter of ethos, draws from the voices of academics and graduate designers from four sustainability-focused design programs internationally to propose theoretical guidelines supporting design educators to develop, enable and sustain design programs that are responsive to a rapidly changing world, in turn equipping design graduates with relevant capabilities to create change towards sustainable futures.

Charlotte has worked on a range of sustainability-focused design and design research projects internationally. Her research is situated at the nexus between design, education, and sustainability. She believes that design education has an important role to play in situating design as key, change-making practice, in the context of sustainability transitions. She is interested in research that informs academics as they develop and implement sustainability-centred curricula and pedagogies, and that supports sustainability transitions in design practice. Charlotte has recently become involved in a research project on climate literacy in architecture in partnership with the Australian Institute of Architects, and the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia.

Charlotte is currently working as Lecturer in Design in the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at The University of Queensland. Previously, she was the Program Convenor for Design and Educational Design Lead at Griffith College, where she coordinated the accreditation and curriculum development processes for the new design program. Charlotte has developed and coordinated sustainability-focused higher education courses in the design field across multiple universities. She has taught in award winning courses including Impact Lab 3 Studio - Planet (QUT) awarded Vice Chancellor Award for Excellence and Wharton - QS (London) Re-Imagine Education Award for Design for Transformative learning through transdisciplinary collaborations, along with the Spatial History Unit awarded QUT Faculty of Creative Industries Teaching Award for Teaching Innovation and Excellence. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). She specialises in developing sustainability-centred Higher Education curricula and professional development resources for academic staff.

Dr Brydon Wang is an author, lawyer, and scholar researching the trustworthy regulation of technology. His work focuses on how we design and govern benevolent data structures and decision-making systems that support human-centric, climate-resilient cities. Dually qualified in law and architecture, Brydon brings more than twenty years of experience across construction, legal practice, and academia. He is currently an Associate Director at KPMG, advising on major infrastructure transactions, and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Policy Futures at the University of Queensland.

​Brydon’s research investigates how regulation can increase the perceived trustworthiness of decision-makers, particularly in contexts of automated systems and informational asymmetry. His interdisciplinary methods blend doctrinal legal analysis with creative research strategies. He was lead editor of Automating Cities: Design, Construction, Operation and Future Impact (Springer, 2021) and lead editor of the forthcoming Large Floating Solutions (Springer, 2025), a volume exploring sustainable marine infrastructure and governance, that follows on from the previous edited collection Large Floating Structures: Technological Advances (Springer 2015). His work has been featured by the Centre for Digital Built Britain (Cambridge University), The Conversation, ABC Radio National’s Future Tense, and Seeker’s How Close Are We to Living in the Ocean?

Before joining KPMG, Brydon taught contract law, data privacy, and AI regulation at the Queensland University of Technology, where he received the 2024 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Early Career Teaching. He also taught Responsible Data Science in UQ’s Master of Data Science programme. His PhD thesis, The Role of Trustworthiness in Automated Decision-making Systems and the Law, was awarded the 2022 Faculty of Business and Law Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. His research combines doctrinal legal research with creative research methodologies to explore the governance of automation, digital infrastructure, and smart urban systems. Through his creative research strategies, Brydon has also become an award-winning artist.

​Brydon began his career in architecture and contract administration on award-winning construction projects, before practising as a technology and construction lawyer at Allens Linklaters. He remains passionate about integrating policy, law, and infrastructure to ensure technological systems are designed with trust and transparency at their core.