Skip to main content
  • abstract black wave

    Study with us

    Undergraduate, postgraduate and short course options.

    Find out more
  • An Aboriginal Culinary Journey. Cooking devices with aboriginal art and colours.

    UTS, Indigenous artists and Breville team up to present an Aboriginal Australian culinary journey

    Learn more about the design partnership

  • My name's Bridget Malcolm. I'm a senior designer  and researcher here at the UTS Design Innovation  

    Research Centre. My role is to lead design  projects with really interesting teams of people  

    and clients with challenging problems. We work  with a really broad range of clients here – in  

    fact over the last 10 years we've completed over  150 projects and they range from reimagining the  

    prison system to designing models of care in the  health sector. The Heart Foundation came to UTS  

    looking to understand how to better support  people who are living with a heart condition,  

    and they wanted to do that through a design  approach. We're undertaking this research  

    partnership in collaboration with the UTS  Centre for Business and Social Innovation.  

    The Heart Foundation chose to partner with UTS  because we really needed some new thinking to the  

    way in which we were approaching providing support  and care to patients or people with heart disease.  

    Traditionally our approach to patient  education and support has been very linear;  

    we really needed the skills of an  organisation or a university like UTS  

    to come in and really complement the way in  which we approach our strategies to support  

    patients or people in the community. The  Design Innovation Research Centre is a social  

    design agency embedded within the University of  Technology Sydney. We work across the forefront  

    of design helping organisations with challenging  situations. What design does is it takes you out  

    of the organisation. It gives you metaphors to  look at and it also helps people to think of  

    a different future and if you begin to think  of a different future you'll become more open  

    to different ways of addressing problems. We've  worked really closely with the Heart Foundation to  

    understand the problem, and one of the ways that  we've done that is we have created a visual map of  

    the healthcare system. These visual maps can  be a really powerful way to diagnose where  

    to intervene in a problem. The process has  been fantastic. It has been a real journey  

    of discovery. So we're bringing our knowledge  of the health problem, but business and design  

    are bringing a whole different skill set to really  help us examine and look at the problem in a way  

    that we would never do traditionally. In health  we hope that at the end of the day our partners  

    find new ways to perceive the problems that  they've never gained traction on in the past and  

    that they can use that perspective to implement  a new solution that works not just for them  

    but for the communities and stakeholders that they  work with and that that change is long lasting.

  • Various footage showing the installation of the Shima Seiki WHOLEGARMENT knit machine at the UTS School of Design.