Speaker · Landscape Architect · Advocate
I notice things about places. Then I ask why.
Why do children ignore the playground and play under the trees? Why do we spend millions on buildings and leave the landscape until last? Why do some places make us want to stay, while others make us want to leave?
Debbie Laporte has spent more than twenty years designing places, watching what happens once people actually use them, and asking what we could do better. Now she brings those questions to the stage.
The premise
What if we looked at places differently?
Debbie is a landscape architect, speaker, and slightly obsessive observer of how people use places. She is interested in what happens after the drawing is finished. Where do people actually go? What do children play with? Which trees survive? What happens when it floods? What gets maintained?
Drawing on more than two decades of projects across Australia and Europe, Debbie combines design, science, research and real project experience to get audiences noticing things they did not notice before — then gives them something useful to take back into their own work.
Three conversations
Three speaking pillars
Play + Education
Adults design playgrounds. Children create play. Debbie challenges the way we think about children's spaces, and what changes when we design around how children actually play, learn and take risks.
Sample talk: Let Them Play — What Happens When We Design for Children Instead of Playgrounds
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Landscape + Cities
Landscape is not decoration. It is infrastructure. Debbie makes the invisible work of trees, creeks, soil and public space visible, and asks why we do not value it accordingly.
Sample talk: Green Gold — Why Every Public Tree Deserves a Line on the Asset Register
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Property + Development
Landscape costs money. Bad decisions cost more. Debbie explores the early decisions that shape value, amenity and maintenance, long before someone asks where the trees are going.
Sample talk: Don't Leave Landscape Until Last — The Development Decisions That Are Hard to Fix Later
Learn more →After the ribbon-cutting
Real projects. Real lessons. Useful ideas.
Debbie is less interested in what should work in theory than in what actually happened. Her presentations share the successes, compromises, surprises and occasional things that seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
- Did people use it?
- Did the plants survive?
- Could anyone maintain it?
- Did it flood?
- What did it cost?
- Would we do it again?
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Debbie has a unique way of making complex ideas clear and accessible, and she holds the audience's attention from start to finish. She leaves people thinking differently about the environments they create.
Tobias Volbert — Co-Founder, 7 Senses Foundation
The observer
Scientist by study. Landscape architect by accident.
Debbie's career started, somewhat unexpectedly, with a calf dissection. She'd gone to university convinced she wanted to become a vet — the calf helped clarify that this was probably not the career for her. A career quiz, the Yellow Pages, and a slightly brave phone call led her to landscape architecture instead.
More than twenty years later, she is still fascinated by the strange and brilliant combination of science, design, people and place that comes with the job.
- Registered Landscape Architect & Founding Director, Orterra
- 20+ years across Australia and Europe
- Former educator, Queensland University of Technology
- Advocacy Committee, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects
- Board Member, Nature Play Queensland
As Heard On
Debbie is available for podcasts, interviews and expert commentary on play, landscape, outdoor environments and the way people experience place.
BE Inspired Podcast
Episode 18 — Designing Outdoor Spaces with Debbie Laporte
Tea with the Queen
Hosted by Emma McQueen — a conversation on landscape, play and place.
The Building Talks Podcast
Public Space Design and How It Shapes the Way We Live
Available as
Speaking formats
Get in touch
Want your audience looking at the world differently?
If you want people leaving the room noticing things differently, questioning a few assumptions, and talking about the ideas afterwards — let's start a conversation.