I had heard that RMIT had a really great reputation for design and I was drawn to also studying in Brunswick because I liked the area. 

I looked at the two options of doing a degree versus doing a diploma. 

The diploma of graphic design was perfect. It's sort of really skills focused and gave me some training with the software, which is something you absolutely need to be taught.

Many lightbulb moments with someone sitting down and showing you how something works, and they're there with you and can ask them questions. 

From conversations I've had with people that have studied elsewhere or done degrees, they don't cover all of that stuff. I was a little bit older and I sort of was really ready to work and make some stuff and the TAFE course was the perfect vehicle for that. 

And I kind of built that skill set up quite fast and could already start making things and that felt amazing.

So the partnered studio is a really integral part of how we teach in the Master of Interior Design. We partnered with GHDWoodhead, they're a large global design practice, and their kind of specialist area is educational learning environments. So that allowed us to expose the students to a really extraordinary set of experts.

My role in the studio experience was to facilitate GHDWoodhead expertise in education and to bring our multidisciplinary specialist to share their experience and stimulate the students with opportunity to embed in their future of hybrid learning.

One of the critical things that they gained from GHDWoodhead being involved in the studio was exposure to a case study project, which was the Wurun campus in Fitzroy, and in that particular instance they were really exposed in detail to a very complex contemporary design of a campus, thinking about the campus as an urban condition, multi-story, which is unusual for high schools, but also a campus that's interconnected with its communities.

We were asked to generate quite a lot of prototypes of learning environments, learning situation, and then you're kind of making an assemblage of them and then really experiment with how things come together and what's the relationship that it produced.

I think the future of learning, it's not just provide students a comfortable learning environment, but also create social relations between student and space, student and teachers, students among themselves, while creating a dynamic learning environment.

It was really terrific just to get that expertise from a practitioner who's on the ground running, doing a live project, and use that as a basis to do their work and to ask questions about how they go about their processes in design. That was very helpful to have GHDWoodhead on board.

We have the opportunity to engage and learn about their design process, the value and strategy Tactics in actualising an educational campus. But I guess what really struck me out of this is the active engagement. Like I really felt that we are sharing a strong enthusiasm towards design and really towards the future of learning environments.

Hopefully for the students it was a really rich experience and one that they found both challenging, because of that kind of group work, but also one that allowed their work to progress much further than it would, than it would working alone.

I think the sort of the two way flow, you know there's no sort of barriers between designers and in our business we try to make everyone the designer, whether they be an architect, an engineer, an interior designer or landscape architect.

Everybody has a contribution to make to design and nobody's got a monopoly on good ideas, or the right idea, because that's something you workshop and you figure out in the process of design, and so we love that sort of interaction

with the students here and we just take those ideas and hopefully share a few ideas to get on that continual cycle of learning and improvement.

It's been a great opportunity for the students to witness the collaboration that works within private practice, not only within their own studio, but to external consultants as well. Also, the amount of research that goes into responding to a brief, they were able to tap into that knowledge and the expertise that GHDWoodhead had to offer.

What's Next - Joanne

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[Music]

[Joanne]

[Laughs] When I tell people I am a human-centred designer, well firstly, I don't normally tell them that, because they are confused, and they ask what that means.

My personal definition of human-centred design is a really simple concept. And that's all about empathy and standing in the shoes of people who are going to experience or be affected by a service or a system.

I started my career working in financial services. I mainly worked in project management and change management roles for about 16 years. While I was working in personal insurance, I was really lucky enough to work with a human-centred design agency. I actually got to do research with customers and be around human-centred designers. And I realised that they were my people. And this is what I had been missing in my career and was missing from my experience in the corporate world. And I felt at home.

I chose to study at RMIT, because the Master of Design Futures program is very heavily focused on human-centred design methods. And I also wanted the opportunity to be able to study online. Because when you are working and you have a family, you don't have the time to come on campus. And so, the Master of Design Futures is an online course, and that gave me a lot of flexibility.

The experience of the Master of Design Futures for me has improved my confidence and my knowledge and understanding of human-centred design in order to connect my day-to-day working experience with the kind of theory and the academic context behind human-centred design.

I am working at Portable and I'm a design strategist lead. A key project that I worked on, that I'm really passionate about, has been with St Vincent’s Hospital. And they have a really special place called the Safe Haven Cafe, which is a place where people who are socially isolated may choose to go. And my job was to help them review the experience of the cafe from the perspective of customers, and also of the employees who work there. So, it was all about understanding the motivations of those customers and why they go to the cafe. What the experience is like when they go there and the impact it has on their life.

I believe human-centred design is a really important skill for everybody to have in the future. Having the ability to listen openly, to be able to bring people together with really different perspectives and be able to design a better world.

What's next for me? I'm about to embark on my final project as part of my Masters. And then, I want to integrate that into my practice at Portable. And maybe I'll do a PhD.

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