Swinburne Design Factory
News
Swinburne set to house new Design Factory - 26 July 2011
The first 'Living Lab' dedicated to design will be housed at Swinburne University of Technology.
iTunesU: Design Factory's Kalevi Ekman - 26 July 2011
Aalto University Design Factory's Kalevi Ekman visited Swinburne in March 2011. A podcast of his presentation is now available.
About Swinburne Design Factory
Swinburne University of Technology houses the first ‘Living Lab’ dedicated to design at an Australian university. A Living Lab brings together end‐users and researchers with companies and other organisations in the early stages of product and service development to experiment with concepts and their potential value.
Today, interest in innovation is rising. Societies face complex problems of the economy, the environment and the urban form. Consumption, goods and services and daily routines all need rethinking, the scale of societies’ challenges and the pace of change providing mounting incentive to innovate. At Swinburne Design Factory, students who aspire to a leading role in the global design business or in the area of design for social innovation have the freedom and resources to create genuine solutions to contemporary needs, from idea generation and proof-of‐concept to prototyping and testing.
Swinburne Design Factory is inspired by and developed in collaboration with the world’s first Design Factory at Aalto University in Helsinki. Aalto University Design Factory pioneered a radically new approach to teaching product and service development by bringing leading business and design scholars, top future talent and a mixture of companies together in a purpose-designed creative environment.
At Swinburne Design Factory teams of business, design, engineering and information technology students collaborate on challenging, externally sponsored projects. Students gain experience in collaboration across disciplinary boundaries to develop radically new ideas about the nature of products and services while being exposed to the conceptual frameworks and methods to create change for organisations, but most importantly for people. Project sponsors gain access to project teams comprised of the next generation of innovators to work on their most challenging, ‘what if’ projects.
Research
In parallel with Swinburne Design Factory, the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology hosts one of the largest clusters of design researchers and PhD design research students in Australia. Student teams working in Swinburne Design Factory regularly draw on these resources in areas including neuroaffective design, design anthropology and strategic design to complete projects, creating the conditions for genuine innovation to occur.
How to Apply
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Swinburne Design Students
Please complete this form if you are currently enrolled in a final year program at Swinburne Design.
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Swinburne Students
Please complete this form if you are currently enrolled in a final year program at Swinburne.
Contact
Simone Taffe
Director, Design Factory
staffe@swin.edu.au
