As part of the What I Wish I Knew Then, a series of free lunchtime talks for Melbourne Design Week Kenyan-Australian designer Sandra Githinji, hosts a conversation exploring the journey to become an interior designer, considering how interior designers navigate the various challenges and opportunities of their careers.
This program is part of Melbourne Design Week 2026. View the full program
Sandra Githinji is the Creative Director of Sandra Githinji Studio, a multidisciplinary practice working across interiors, objects, and curation. She is an Associate Lecturer and a PhD candidate at RMIT University where her practice-led research explores home, migration, and belonging. Within her studio and research, her work is guided by the gestures of remembering, reclaiming, reimagining, and reconnecting, offering a design approach that is iterative, relational, and attentive to what has been fractured. Through spatial design, material experimentation, and collaborative projects across multiple disciplines, she explores how everyday gestures and inherited stories can be transformed into spaces and artefacts that honour lived experience. Across these contexts, her practice seeks to cultivate material, social, and symbolic forms of repair, creating environments that hold memory and imagination.
What I Wish I Knew Then pairs emerging designers with experienced industry leaders for candid, cross-generational conversations. Each session is moderated by an expert and explores lessons learned, creative risks, and pivotal career moments, offering insight, inspiration.