Dr Victoria Firth-Smith is an experience designer, researcher, and creative producer based in so-called Australia.

Her work explores a central question: Who gets to enter, on whose terms, and what does it feel like to come, here?

Victoria partners with governments, universities, cultural institutions, and communities to design experiences that are inclusive, affective, and made from lived experience. Her practice spans civic and social innovation, creative placemaking, and public engagement.

Victoria holds a PhD in Experience Design from Monash University, 2025. Her doctoral research used queer autoethnography to examine how designed environments shape, and often restrict, who is allowed in, and how it feels to come in. Drawing on international fieldwork and her lived experience as a queer designer, her work positions welcome as a designed experience, not an assumed outcome. She challenges the myth of neutral or universal design daily, explores how environments shape intimacy and participation, and advocates for intentional, embodied, and justice-oriented design practices. Her work reframes coming in, to ourselves and to each other, as something actively constructed across social, spatial, and emotional dimensions.

Victoria's work is grounded in the understanding that feeling is data, and she makes pleasure purposeful - by creating bliss, with a fist. Influenced by the genius of Audre Lorde and many other fellow dykes, she treats the erotic not as indulgence, but as a critical design resource. Pleasure offers a way of understanding what it means to feel welcomed, recognised, and transformed within a place. This approach informs her work across every domain: arts and cultural programs, education and learning environments, cities and public space, queer and community-led initiatives.

Live. Laugh. Lube. Is the provocation at the heart of her practice. Pleasure is not frivolous. It is infrastructural.

Victoria works locally, nationally, and internationally, collaborating with organisations ready to engage deeply in innovation and meaningful change. 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.