Rebecca Nally and Chris Speed
Posture as Authors: This paper is written from unceded eastern Kulin lands on Birrarung-ga, inside a design school at RMIT University, Melbourne. We sit unevenly inside this configuration: one of us a design educator whose research engages relational economies on and off-Country; the other a professor asked to demonstrate “regeneration” through frameworks, partnerships and metrics that reassure sponsors and satisfy managerial instruments. We are implicated in the instruments we critique and obligated to the sovereignties and relational economies that precede them. This posture aligns with what Tunstall (2023) names “Putting Indigenous First”: understanding one’s positionality in relation to Indigenous sovereignty before engaging in design practice on stolen lands.
Relational Knowing and Incommensurable Logics: When a young Gudanji man explained his swift journey across Country by saying “my feet know this place”, his Gudanji kin understood a tacit relation between feet, Country, time and movement that exceeded metric description (Dank, 2025). For non-Gudanji visitors, the same words registered differently. We read this encounter through work on relational knowing, coloniality and incommensurability to ask what happens when relations grounded in different world-making logics become legible through institutional forms.
Instruments of Separation: Drawing on Frederick et al.’s (2026) reading of Álvaro Vieira Pinto, we approach design methods, economic indicators and systemic frameworks as situated technics that participate in making worlds. The tally stick offers a historical figure for this problem: an instrument that makes obligation portable, verifiable and actionable at a distance. We then consider contemporary instruments including impact KPIs, SDG alignment, workplace and course surveys, stakeholder maps and engagement metrics, asking under what conditions they abstract relation into forms available for reporting, comparison and managerial action.
Attendant Instruments: Responding to Dank’s phrase “attendant artefacts”, we propose attendant instruments to name the wider ensembles of tools, practices, governance routines and institutional arrangements that gather around instruments and shape how relations are recognised and acted upon. We use sovereign offerings as an analytical term for acts of sovereignty already underway that precede and exceed institutional recognition.
Contribution: Attendant instruments offers systemic design a practice of noticing what gathers around our tools, what forms of relation those arrangements can hold, and whether they remain answerable to the worlds from which those relations arise. Pluralism becomes material here: the condition of working within and across worlds that do not share the same instruments of knowing.
Keywords: relational economies, systemic design pluralism, regenerative futures, institutional transformation, Indigenous sovereignty, positionality