Susan Mavor

Susan creates compelling and informative storytelling environments. From her roots in theatre design, followed by book, stamp, and brand design, Susan has a reputation for being a thoughtful listener and a creative designer. She is a design practitioner and scholar who truly likes working with large committees to create consensus and enthusiasm around shared ideas.

Based in Vancouver on the ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ Nations, she is the Principal and Creative Lead of Lost & Found Design. The studio focuses on wayfinding, exhibition design, and reconciliation. Projects include collaborations up and down the west coast, at parks, campuses and cities from Lima, Peru to Juneau, Alaska. Lost & Found is currently working on interpretive design and wayfinding for the Royal BC Museum and Provincial Archives campus, Host Nations cultural visibility projects with Metro Vancouver, and several multifaceted property developments across Canada.

Susan leverages design process and projects in revealing and dismantling Canada’s colonial relationship to Indigenous communities. After almost thirty years of museum and graphic design work supporting Indigenous groups, she’s learned to practice active listening and has developed radical and reciprocal ways of design collaboration. In this work, she creates paid spaces in her design teams that include Indigenous artists, knowledge keepers, youth, and others. The intent is to go beyond consultation with communities and offer capacity building and co-mentoring to all participants. Current work in this vein includes interpretive process and design for parks with City of Surrey and Metro Vancouver, such as təmtəmíxʷtən/Belcarra and Tynehead Regional Parks, as well as signage and environmental graphics with UBC.

Specialties: exhibit design, storytelling in three-dimensional environments, symbol design, application of a branded system across media, wayfinding strategy, community engagement, creating consensus in complex political environments.