Dr Victoria Firth-Smith designs the meeting points between people, places, and power.

Who gets to enter, on whose terms, and what does it feel like to come, here?

Victoria is an experience designer, researcher, and civic strategist based in nipaluna/Hobart. She partners with governments, universities, cultural institutions, and communities to turn research and strategy into public experiences, programs, and places people can actually enter, use, and belong to.

Victoria holds a PhD in Experience Design from Monash University. Her doctoral research used autoethnography to examine how designed environments shape, and often restrict, who is allowed in, and how it feels to come in. Her work reframes coming in, to ourselves and to each other, as something actively constructed across social, spatial, and emotional dimensions, and asks what happens when cities and institutions design for that feeling on purpose.

Victoria's work is grounded in the understanding that feeling is data. She treats pleasure not as decoration but as evidence, a rigorous and often overlooked way of testing whether a place, a policy, or a program actually works for the people inside it. Drawing on Audre Lorde and a lineage of feminist and queer theorists, she treats the erotic as a critical design resource for civic and social innovation, not an indulgence. This is her working method, not a metaphor, across cities and public space, arts and cultural programs, education and learning environments, and community-led initiatives.

She makes cities people want to come, in.

Victoria works locally, nationally, and internationally, collaborating with governments and organisations ready to engage deeply in innovation and meaningful change, and to ask what their citizens actually feel when they walk through the door. When you meet her at a party and ask what she does, she'll say: "world peace and inner peace, what else is there?" If you're keen on either, or if you're making something worth entering, including yourself get in touch.