The History of World’s Art, Design, and Culture have captivated my heart since I studied Visual Communication Design program in 2003.

In 2008, I became a full-time lecturer at Universitas Ciputra Surabaya, an entrepreneurship-focused university, and I have been teaching courses related to World’s Art, Design, and Culture together with Cross-Cultural Design in the context of Creative and Cultural Industries in various multi-discipline design undergraduate programs, including Visual Communication Design, Interior Architecture, and Fashion Design. My focus is to teach design students to create new cultural-based designs.

In 2011 I became one of the Kauffman Global Faculty who intensively studied entrepreneurship education at the Kauffman Foundation for entrepreneurship in Kansas City, USA, and I started to dive deeper into the topic of design, entrepreneurship, cultural, and creative industries with one goal that is to investigate the ideal role of cultural heritage in the design education for the creative economy. For this, I received a scholarship from the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) in 2016.

Upon attaining a Master of Art in Art and Design in Education in 2017 from University College London (UCL), Institute of Education (IoE), I established the Centre for Creative Heritage Studies (CCHS) at Universitas Ciputra Surabaya and its Museum for Creative Heritage Studies in 2018. I believe that one of the best ways to preserve cultural heritage is to create anew and to do so requires the collaboration of creative and cultural learning institutions, such as the museum and design higher education. This idea is based on the definition of heritage as being co-created in the present based on past values for the future.

That is why as the head of the Centre for Creative Heritage Studies, I am so thrilled to be able to join hands with the Tracing Patterns Foundation to work on the “Indonesian Textile Stories and Legends” program, with the objective to document and digitize the diverse cultural wealth of Indonesian textile cultural history.

Through the “Indonesian Textile Stories and Legends” program, we would like to build a critical and creative community of cultural enthusiasts, academicians, and practitioners, and to offer the opportunity for collectors and especially indigenous artisans and cultural workers to share their tangible and intangible heritage in a digital platform. We hope that this program could be a medium to celebrate Indonesia’s diverse cultural heritage, promote their voice, and inspire other researchers, art and design educators, and future artists and designers to co-create sustainable Indonesian cultural heritage for the future.