Industry
education
Client
Melbourne University
Designing an Engagement-First Symposium Experience for Critical Girlhood Studies in Indonesia

How might we design the CGS Symposium's experience so its research travels beyond the seminar room, reaching young people and communities, and turning scholarship into mobilization?
The CGS Symposium (Critical Girlhood Studies in Indonesia) is an academic symposium convened by researchers affiliated with the University of Melbourne, extending the research agenda of "Shifting the Paradigm: Rethinking Research on Indonesian Girls and Young Women" toward an edited volume. Across two days and four panels, it brings together scholars, activists, artists, educators, and community practitioners around issues from reproductive justice and decolonial girlhood to digital surveillance and feminist knowledge practices. Symposiums like this are built to produce rigorous scholarship, not necessarily to be seen. Presentations live inside panels, abstracts live inside PDFs, and by default the audience is other academics. But the issues on the agenda, girls' bodily autonomy, digital exposure, reproductive stigma, are issues that live outside academia too, carried by young people and organizers who will never open a conference paper. Before designing any interface, we started with that gap. Lab Anotasi partnered with the symposium's convenors to design the digital experience around CGSIS 2026, not as a conference microsite, but as a public entry point into the research: turning all 19 presentations into standalone readable articles, building an archive that keeps the work discoverable after the two days end, and shaping a format built for someone who has never sat in a seminar. The brief moved past "build a website" into a harder design question, how to keep the academic rigor intact while making the work legible, findable, and worth sharing to the people it's actually about.





