CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR INNOVATION
The business and R&D landscape of Australia is rapidly changing and we believe that the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to use design thinking and co-creation methods to discover new offerings.
Our interdisciplinary teams work together on real world projects, with local and global partners, using human centered design methods to co-create extraordinary insights and outcomes. This diversity of minds, skills, and experience drives R&D capability and impact.
THE LATEST FROM DFM
Future Ready Swinburne – Fearless Innovation Initiative Driving Innovation Readiness and Staff Capability
The Fearless Innovation initiative was designed and developed to support Swinburne staff with capabilities to identify opportunities and create impactful solutions and the confidence to drive change. The initiative drives a culture of innovation through staff training and creates opportunities to operationalise Swinburne’s 2025 strategy to be an innovative enterprise.
Prototyping from home: Design Factory Melbourne supports students to create remotely
DFM has created ‘ProtoKIT’ to help students build and make prototypes while they study remotely.
Putting people first to drive innovation – key ingredients for staff capability building
Capability building is a common way to increase the competence of an organisation. Workshop design plays a major role on the type of benefits you gain from training as a participant and from an organisational perspective. This article outlines some of the benefits in two different staff training scenarios.
Discovering a safety net in disruption: My time at Design Factory Melbourne
A place to call home and a home away from home. A community of like-minded individuals, ready and willing to challenge the status quo. Industrial designers, engineers, mad makers, disruptors, all creators in their respective field… and all somewhat gastronomically obsessed or curious. This is how I would encapsulate the brilliant couple of years and the incredible people I worked alongside during my time at Design Factory Melbourne (DFM).
Semester 1 Snapshot: What a semester this has been!
We are sure many of us have found and built a new resilience and capability to adapt in the past few months. This certainly has been true to our students, working in interdisciplinary teams together with industry partners on complex societal, environmental and business challenges.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
DAILY PRACTICE OF INNOVATION
Small actions, big shifts
What makes up a typical workday? It can differ vastly from creating new ideas for a program launch to framing customer needs in a compelling way for a project proposal. How can we then make each day as productive as possible?
Over the last two years, we at DFM have gathered a range of productivity perspectives to the core work we do around innovation. Now, we are sharing our insights with everyone through this Daily Practice of Innovation: Small actions, big shifts book.
This book is a collection of insights and activities to find new perspectives in your daily work. In it, we explore how to set the foundations for a productive day, leverage the most of your time, find opportunities hidden in plain sight, boost energy, and gain new perspectives at work. The activities are brief and require no prior knowledge, so you can jump right into the doing.
We also love to thank Jaiden Gusti, our DFM alumnus, for the design of the book!
RE-THINK. RE-FRAME. RE-IMAGINE
A Year of Resilience
Is there a better time than now to illustrate the importance of innovative practices in the face of uncertainty?
The last 18 months have forced a lot of us to take a step back and assess our approach to challenging circumstances.
At DFM, we took this opportunity to embrace resilience and continue to convert our expertise into action. We remained curious and open to new opportunities and experimentation, seeking new ideas from a variety of perspectives. We directed our focus towards the future, imagining the possibilities of inclusive design, design for science and technology and innovation ecosystems.
Our new publication, Re-Think, Re-Frame, Re-Imagine, highlights the different avenues in which we applied this mindset, from our student and industry projects, professional workshops, community-based activities, and our latest research.
Discover our insights in our new publication, available online now.
GET A GLIMPSE INTO LIFE AS A DF STUDENT
Josh Bragagnolo
Industrial Design student Josh has completed both the local and global streams at DFM – read about his experience.
AMELIA IVERSON
Read about how Business student Amelia Iverson’s experience with DFM shaped her future path.
JAIDEN GUSTI
EMILY CHEESMAN
As part of Emily Cheesman’s Master of Occupational Therapy she is completing a stream of units with DFM. Read about her introduction to design thinking here.