Design and Creative Practice

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Design and Creative Practice

Design and Creative Practice

Ensuring social connection and sustainability are enhanced by new technologies through design and creative practice research that draws on social and digital innovation.

We ask how design and creative practice can be deployed to reimagine health, resilience and wellbeing; how play can be used as a probe for creative solutions; how to re-imagine a world that has equality, biodiversity and sustainability at its core; and, how to look at the models for conceptualising design and creativity as creating value for industry.

Through existing research at the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and the School of Media and Communication, we have highlighted how looking at media practice ethnographically can bring about important and nuanced understandings of today’s evolving technology, particularly the underlying motivations around social experiences.

Naomi Stead

Our Vision

Professor Naomi Stead, Director, RMIT Design and Creative Practice ECP

We will apply an inventive, explorative and rigorous approach to addressing real-world problems that lie at the intersection of digital design, health, sustainable practice and material innovation. 

We are committed to advancing social, health and digital innovation and developing alternative pathways for producing knowledge and achieving impact through collaboration.

Our impact

Capability Development Fund (CDF) Projects

These projects contribute to Capability Development, Industry Engagement, Capability Deployment and Research Translation.

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ECP Opportunity Fund (EOF) Projects

Find out about how DCP researchers are using this funding to enhance their research.

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DCP Events

Find out more about upcoming and past DCP Events.

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ECP Post-COVID-19 Restart Initiatives

Along with harnessing existing research networks and projects to respond to COVID-19, RMIT’s Enabling Capability Platforms (ECPs) launched five cross-platform initiatives in June 2020 to address various key areas for post COVID-19 recovery. 

Find out more about our restart initiatives
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Impact Observatory

For more information about our research please visit our Impact Observatory website:

dcp-ecp.com

DCP Design Challenge spotlight

2019 - Haptic Pathways
Haptic Pathways  reimagines the suburban street creating diverse sensory experiences that explicitly include urban residents or visitors of all mobilities and neurodiversities.
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2018 - CaTPin
CaTPin presented the idea of  ​“conversation as therapy’. It aimed to address the issue of loneliness due to a lack of social interaction by developing a discreet, low-cost wearable.
Read more

DCP Research Networks

CAD Network

The Creative Arts and Design Network (CAD) seeks to respond to the various ways in which national and international frameworks are being used to articulate the value of the creative arts and design, specifically their social and cultural impact.

CVIN

DSI Network

The Design for Social Innovation Network (DSI) at RMIT responds to the pressing social, environmental, and technical issues of our times with researchers who collaboratively contribute on designs for social innovation that are effective in navigating our future by tackling issues of sustainability, health, technology, and social exclusion of vulnerable people.

HASH

W+SN

SASCCAR

SASCCAR’s vision for 2020 is to establish RMIT as a national leader in space and spatial research through strengthening of internal and external collaboration.

DCP Affiliated Networks

Creating impact in the community

Elements in the cloud
Researchers are working on translating RMIT’s award-winning Elements rehabilitation tool, for brain injury, into an integrated system of hardware and software for clinic and home use. This includes the design and testing of a cloud-based delivery system that customises cognitive and motor tasks for the individual. This project may enhance the provision of rehabilitation services by engaging clients in more sustained and intense forms of therapy to augment and accelerate recovery.
HASH Network
The Health, Arts, Social sciences and Humanities (HASH) Network brings together collaborators from the social sciences, humanities, medicine, arts, and science and technology. It will draw on contributions from a wide range of academic researchers, health practitioners, health service users, and early career researchers. HASH aims to ignite creative connections and collaborations among members.

Key application areas

Health and aged care
Technology and digital innovation
Urban, transport and social planning
Arts and cultural heritage
Media and communications

Research and innovation priorities

Resilience, health and care

Exploring how design and creative practice can be deployed to:

  • promote health, resilience and wellbeing
  • reimagine care services, facilities, infrastructure and behaviours
  • develop creative solutions to social problems and
  • keep social connection at the heart of human interactions

Playful and material encounters

Investigating how play and the notion of ‘the playful’ can be used as a mechanism for:

  • generating creative and inventive solutions to real-world problems
  • harnessing technological innovations creatively to reinterpret our material world for the better and
  • transforming how geographic places are experienced and defined

The social and sustainable

How we envisage a world:

  • that has equality, biodiversity and sustainability at its core and
  • where social connection continues to be pivotal to human existence

Design and creative practice industries

Identifying and evaluating how design and creative practice:

  • add value to industry and
  • enable creative solutions for improving health care and aged care, urban living and our ability to live in social and environmentally sustainable ways

Want to find out more about the Design and Creative Practice ECP?

Contact DCP ECP: naomi.stead@rmit.edu.au

Contact Research Capability at RMIT

Connect with RMIT Research

If you're not sure how you can best work with us, our team can explain what's possible and put you in touch with the right person. 

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Acknowledgement of country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Luwaytini' by Mark Cleaver, Palawa.

More information
aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.

More information