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The inaugural Design for Impact Festival organised by RMIT University will open on Thursday 23 July at the University’s City and Brunswick campuses and various City locations.
Led by RMIT’s Design Research Institute, the Festival will feature a series of events that showcase the breadth of RMIT’s design research and promote collaboration between researchers, industry and government.
Design Research Institute (DRI) Director Professor Swee Mak commented that the Festival would help to explain the role of design in achieving effective and sustainable solutions to complex societal issues.
According to Mak, designing for meaningful impact can lead to more effective solutions that affect every aspect of life from the quality of living to national security, and from public policy to economic, health, social, cultural and environmental benefits, all of which have a bearing on Australia’s future.
The Festival will also spotlight multidisciplinary design research with meaningful impact and provide a key opportunity for interactive engagement between RMIT’s research community and a broad mix of community, industry and government partners.
The Design for Impact Festival will feature a series of events showcasing RMIT’s design and technology research, and innovation and entrepreneurship:
- Sketcha Kucha event with Materfad’s Smart Flexibility exhibitor – Phil Ayre’s, CITA, Copenhagen
- Brain Waves Symposium
- Co-design for Sexual Health Wellbeing and Aging
- Teams made in Heaven – designing effective innovation teams
- Designing Business Development
- Disaster, Design and Development
- Creating Impact from Effective Translation of Design Research
- Fashion and Textiles Industry Seminar, and
- Service Design and Big Data
A major international touring exhibition ‘Smart Flexibility: Advanced Materials and Technologies’, curated by Materfad, Spain, is expected to be a major draw for design professionals. Materfad Materials Library Manager, Valérie Bergeron explained that the Smart Flexibility Exhibition illustrated the result of combining flexible structures and active materials to form systems that interact with the environment and/or user.
Bergeron said that the exhibition included three magnificent RMIT projects – Lumina, Penumbra and Aesthetics of Air, thanks to the Australian curating team. She added that the exhibition offered a great opportunity for further research in the field of Smart Flexibility and also represented an important collaboration for Materfad with a prestigious Australian university of technology and design.
The Design for Impact Festival will showcase the vibrancy of RMIT’s design research and innovation eco-system and aims to ensure that RMIT research is relevant to the needs of the community, government and industry in the years ahead.
The Design for Impact Festival will be held from Thursday 23 July to Sunday 9 August 2015. More information can be accessed at Design for Impact Festival.
The Smart Flexibility – Advanced Materials and Technologies exhibition will be held from Friday 24 July to Sunday 9 August 2015. More information can be accessed at Smart Flexibility exhibition.
