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.

Our Vision

Larissa Hjorth, 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.

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.

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

Impact Observatory

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

dcp-ecp.com

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

Contact us

Contact DCP: dcp.ecp@rmit.edu.au
Follow us on Twitter: @dcpecp
Register as an affiliate

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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.