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.

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

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.

The digital diaries are about the thoughts and experiences of young people in residential care who, as well as recording their story,  also participated in the development of the design features of their stories with Design Centre students.

It was a collaboration over a period of 8-10 weeks with one design student being assigned to work one on one with a young person.

The digital diaries create a positive and lasting memory for these young people but most importantly they are an extremely effective training tool for direct carers who work in out of home care settings.

The training materials,  including these AV materials,  will be rolled out across all training organisations who deliver the Certificate IV in Protective Care in Victoria.  They will also be used by the Department of Human Services and placed in every residential care organisation in Victoria.

With the success of the previous years ‘Tales from the High Rise’, the 2nd instalment had secured funding and also extended the brief by including voices of non- English speaking tenants.
Our project, Tales from the High Rise, has resulted from a partnership established with Swinburne University’s Design Centre* (Prahran Campus), their students and 9 tenants (story tellers) from the High Rise Support Program estates (King St, Victoria Ave, Union St, and Inkerman St).
The project is a collaboration between the high-rise storytellers, Inner South Community Health Service and Swinburne Design Centre.

The tenants teamed up with Swinburne honours students to create three-minute videos that combine the storyteller’s voice with memorabilia from their personal archives, such as photographs, film, certificates, music and sound.
The second series built on the pilot, and included stories in languages other than English, and brought together the many different nationalities that live side by side in public housing in the inner south of Melbourne.

The Inner South Community Health Old Persons Support Team and Swinburne University Design Centre launched a Digital Storytelling Project in 2006. This pilot project called “Tales from the High Rise” was a collaboration between Inner South and the Design Centre which was aimed at encouraging residents from public housing to share thier stories with a wider audience, to promote self worth amongst the participants and to foster a wider awareness of people in public housing. The project was launched to a packed house at the Design Gallery in Prahran.