Jon Gordon Kuiter

Design is a global market. It could be the production of a building, a magazine or a show. The client could be from the other side of the planet. The most important thing is that students understand that there is a global culture and they can design for that culture.

Meet our Experts

Jon Kuiter 

Shaping designers: the modern-day inventors 

Hi, my name is Jon Kuiter. I joined RMIT in 2021. I am currently the coordinator for the School of Communication & Design here at Hanoi campus and I'm also an Associate Lecturer for Design Studies.

My original background was interior design and I practised that for about eight years while teaching it in Malaysia, both in Penang and KL.

Then I decided to change my design background into visual communication, and I started getting interested in the entertainment industry and concept development and speculative design for video games and film.

So now I focus on developing creative strategies and photo bashing, mixing photos together to create unique ideas from scratch. 

After returning to the UK, I felt that my life made more sense in Southeast Asia. So, after my Malaysian experience, I applied to come back to Southeast Asia and Hanoi interested me.

I found that while working here, I could easily explore around Hanoi’s beautiful old town with all the little stores which have more and more independent artists practising. You've got the pottery of Bat Trang and so on [being] very much part of the city.

You've got that great mix of traditional culture and yet the modernisation of what's happening in the world and the global change of Hanoi which is really beautiful to see.

Design is a big part of economic development. Designer is the modern-day inventor. You can create something where people look at a product in a different way. You're helping to create new trends and new influence. 

My students, if they're going to be designers and they're going to survive in the design industry, they could very well be based here in Vietnam, have a client from overseas, in America or something, you don't know. So, no matter where you're designing, you are globally minded.

So, design’s about problem solving. While [for] most people it’s like “problem – solution", designers are like “problem - solution A, B, C, D” and then, you know, see the different iterations and options.

I sketch all the time. Creating a sketchbook or visual journal isn't just about the sketching, there's also research. And I love to print things out on a printer or draw all over them, write on them, reflect about them, build on the ideas within existing works, and also test my own experiments as well.

Sketching is one of my key components with my students. For example, if I have a large group, I'll get my document viewer above and I'll start sketching so they can see on the projector.  

When I'm doing tutorials, I will sit with a group of students around a table. Sometimes it's a small sketchbook, sometimes it's a big piece of paper, but the idea is that we visually communicate what I'm saying. 

Being able to sit with a student and actually illustrate what they're saying, and then they illustrate what I'm saying, or go through some sort of development together, they learn a lot more in terms of the process of design. 

The students will realise that the design industry isn't just one person and the ability to work with each other is so important. That ability to talk, collaborate, even argue [about] a particular idea is really, really important. 

And the great thing about Design Studies at RMIT is every one of us has a different background and we teach many different disciplines. So, you get that extra collaboration and all that extra knowledge when we're teaching our students.