HILARY DODD
hilaryjdodd@gmail.com
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Hilary Dodd is a graphic designer working across editorial and spatial practices predominantly within arts and cultural contexts. With a background in visual art and education, her work spans publications, exhibitions, and public learning environments.
Hilary’s work has been recognised through exhibitions and national design awards, including the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) and the Australian Book Designers Association (ABDA).
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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
LIST OF WORKS
01_CHRONICLE FEED
Acetate, overhead projector (above)
In Compass, a chronicle entry is a digital record used by teachers to log incidents of student behaviour. Entries accumulate into a student profile, colour-coded by severity: green alerts for positive incidents, amber for moderate, red for serious.
These projections reproduce a continuous chronicle feed from the publication and are fabricated entries based on real data. The entries make visible the institutional language and systematic manner through which student behaviour is categorised, stored and read.
02_UNTITLED (SERIES)
Inkjet prints on aluminium composite panel
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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
03_CAMPUS AI
Single-channel digital video, 40 sec
Pamphlets
Each pamphlet reworks a real advertisement from Compass (the original advertisements can be seen on the reverse side), replacing its imagery with new characters and surveillance iconography.
CampusAl pushes the soft, well-being-focused design of platforms like Compass to an extreme. Set in the near future, CampusAl introduces GaitState, a predictive AR tool that monitors students' gait, mood and movement. Drawn from a game-like aesthetic similar to that of Squid Game, the result is a cute culture jam: a form of critical mimicry that plays the system's own visual language back at itself until the logic becomes visible.
By exaggerating Compass' pastel palettes, friendly icons and supportive rhetoric, the project exposes how surveillance and care have merged into a single seamless system. Working with Al as both collaborator and subject, the work embraces imperfections, misread gestures, distorted interfaces and unnerving friendliness.
04_A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH
PhotoTex digital prints
These prints are reproductions of Compass Education's advertising material and interfaces. With the friendly blue colours and softened language stripped away from these ads, what is exposed is a relatively unchanged system of control beneath the surface. CampusAl exaggerates the aesthetics of Compass' soft design until it tips into absurdity, whereas here, the opposite is done.
What happens when we strip away the soft design of Compass ads and start to zoom in?
Educational reforms are often surface-level rebrands rather than real change—bells replaced with pop songs and policies softened through language. Altering one part of a system won't work unless the whole network of relationships is reconsidered. The same architectures of control persist, rebranded.
In systems like Compass, design dictates how teachers write, what counts as behaviour, and how care becomes data. When a machine enters that logic, it reveals how digital systems now shape tone as much as structure: persuasive, smooth and almost human. The machine now speaks in the same polite, emotionally neutral voice already embedded in schooling.
The language of systems and the language of care have started to sound the same. If these systems already shape how we write and communicate, what happens when they begin to predict how we