Swinburne Design Centre is a multi-disciplinary consultancy where students who have completed their undergraduate design degrees, work for one or two years to gain honours or masters degrees in communication, multimedia and industrial design.

Professional design practise skills are greatly enhanced by working on real design and applied design research projects for real clients, the majority business and organisations outside the university.

The Director and Managers provide project direction and mentoring to design teams to enable Design Centre to deliver project outcomes to a high professional standard – ready to be successfully implemented by clients.

A key part of the Design Centre experience is learning to develop design solution that deliver tangible benefits to the end users – our clients’ customer.

Working with Inner South Community Health Services and the Office of Housing, Design Centre produced 20 three minute digital stories around three themes, “homelessness”, “affordable housing and “employment”.
Using a series of workshops over a 4 month period , Design Centre students engaged with a large number of participants of various ages and from various backgrounds to produce their digital stories around these themes. The students and participants worked together on scripting the stories, story-boarding and design research aspects, with the students undertaking the final production of the digital stories.
The finished 20 stories were launched and exhibited at the PA Gallery at Swinburne University over a 2 week period and then went on to be exhibited by the Office of Housing at the biennial Housing Conference.

Working with Inner South Community Health Services SRS Team and the Department of Human Services, Design Centre students engaged with the tenants of local SRS (Supported Residential Services) to produce a series of 3 minute digital stories about the lives of the tenants.
The stories focus on various aspects of the tenants lives, how they arrived in the SRS program and their thoughts on the SRS program.
The stories will be used to showcase the lives of those living in the SRS program and the issues they face on a day to day basis.

Design Centre produced a promotional DVD for the Alfred Hospital’s Volunteers program.
The story structure of the DVD is based around a journey through the hospital.
The DVD informs potential volunteers about variety of roles available to them within the hospital and shares the experience of current volunteers with interviews, whilst exploring the Alfred Hospital.

Design Centre was approached by Media and Communications at Swinburne University to create a new look for the MOTIF (Media of the Immediate Future). The website will be used to showcase the latest and greatest work in the area of student journalism, be it written, audio or video.
Design Centre came up with an engaging design that encourages current students to showcase their work, we also developed a full style guide of the design, for Media and Communications to implement in the site.
The site can be viewed at http://motif.swinmc.net/about/

In conjunction with Swinburne Centenary celebration, an exhibition and publication called Pen to Pixel was developed to highlight the evolution of design at Swinburne University over the past century. Nanette Carter researched and selected 10 Swinburne graduates over 10 decades, representative of a period these designers were featured in the publication and exhibition. The exhibition was held in July at Chapel off Chapel Gallery in Prahran. The publication was used as an exhibition catalogue and continues to be used by the Faculty of Design as a promotional piece.

The Living Room is a drop in centre for drug-affected youth. It provides assistance, care facilities and information for young people going through tough times. A team of workers at the Living Room secured funding to develop a major information campaign to increase awareness in its target market of Blood Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmitted Infections.

This project team engaged Design Centre to conduct the preliminary user-centered research and then from these findings develop the multimedia and print components of the campaign.

The final outcomes included a range of characters developed to both engage and inform the audience. Outcomes developed by Design Centre include an interactive CD, postcards series, and informational booklet all contained within a *pizza box* style package.

View the STI information animations

Design Centre was invited to design an exhibition stand and publication to showcase the work completed through the CRC Wood Innovations project. The exhibition stand featured at Furnitex, a large furniture conference held at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. This exhibition display was designed to provide the CRC team with the opportunity to demonstrate their achievements. The CRC Wood Innovations* research findings in the properties of wood for furniture construction were explained in the publication.

Since 2006 Inner South Community Health Service (ISCHS) has been working with the Swinburne University Multimedia Design Centre to produce a series of digital stories. The aim is to enable older people from living in public housing in the inner south area of Melbourne the opportunity to share an aspect of their lives through the development of a DVD resource.

‘Storytellers’ from across five public housing high-rise sites have been linked with multimedia design students to identify a piece of personal history and support each other in developing a three minute story that truly reflects the essence of each story teller through the use of personal memorabilia and digital animation.

Design students from Swinburne University were linked with nominated storytellers to help them develop and produce their individual stories. Storytellers met regularly with the students and the High Rise Support team to learn and support each other through the project.

The stories are very diverse, reflect the varied cultural and linguistic mix of the tenants, and are important in promoting a more positive image of older people living in public housing.

This third series encompasses two themes – the celebration of friendships and starting to explore the richness of our indigenous community. Five stories focus on the unique nature of friendships, which are often taken for granted; our first two indigenous stories provide an insight into the indigenous community.

The Bayley House Annual Report was a pro-bono project undertaken by Design Centre. Bayley House cares for intellectually disabled adults and this project provided Design Centre with a challenging opportunity to develop a concept that reflected the vibrant yet caring nature of the environment.