HILARY DODD
hilaryjdodd@gmail.com
Instagram
Linkedin
Hilary Dodd is a graphic designer working across print and space, with a background in visual art and education. She is interested in how designed experiences communicate atmosphere, tone, materiality, and meaning. Using site-responsive and narrative strategies, she seeks to connect intimate experiences and nuanced subject matter with wider cultural contexts. Alongside her design practice, Hilary has worked as a teacher across primary, secondary, university, and museum settings. This informs a practice that values clarity, engagement, and accessibility for diverse audiences.
Her work has been recognised through institutional exhibitions and national design awards, including the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) and the Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA). Hilary has a particular interest in creative direction and concept-driven projects that operate across books, spaces, and cultural contexts.
CV
SURGING THROUGH EXITS WHEN THE BELL GOES EXHIBITION | RESEARCH | PHOTOGRAPHY
SURGING THROUGH EXITS WHEN THE BELL GOES
EXHIBITION | RESEARCH | PHOTOGRAPHY
First Site Gallery, Melbourne
Year: 2026
— Photos by Christian Capurro
DESCRIPTION
An extension of the research project and book, “Aesthetics of the not so hidden curriculum,” with critical design approaches, archival images, photography, and speculative video and design work.
This exhibition positions the hidden curriculum₁ as an aesthetic backdrop shaping how schools are experienced and inhabited. By examining both traditional and digital cues, the space reveals how surveillance and regulation persist through atmosphere and design. Here, ‘aesthetics’ does not refer to beauty, but the way environments are felt and inhabited.
It explores the tension between closed systems like schools and the placelessness of online systems by examining how digital infrastructures aestheticise and normalise control as care, shaping the hidden curriculum through platforms, interfaces and everyday design cues.
Central to this project is Compass Education, which is an online school management platform widely used in Australian high schools. It records attendance, communicates with parents and logs behaviour incidents. In practice, schools mostly use it to record student behaviour throughout the day. Digital platforms like Compass act as invisible architecture, regulating behaviour like physical walls and creating a digitally expanded school. Gamified dashboards and chronicle feeds saturate students' screens, seeping beyond school gates and into their homes. The hidden curriculum has become ambient.
₁The hidden curriculum refers to the unwritten, informal lessons learned implicitly in schools