Community Coworking Day @ Design Factory Melbourne
What it is
We're opening the Fire Station for a day of co-working, learning, and connecting, capped off with a celebration of five new ideas for the future of university.
Bring your laptop, grab a desk, and work alongside students, industry folks and the team from Design Factory Melbourne, Swinburne's interdisciplinary innovation lab. There's optional programming throughout the day for those who want to learn some new creativity tools and meet others in the innovation space, but you can also just come and get some work done.
At the end of the day, our Design Factory interns will be sharing their vision for the future of uni.
Our interns come from a variety of different disciplines, from climate and social justice to branding, marketing, and computer science, and have spent 12 weeks prototyping what university could look like if we designed it from scratch. This is a chance for you to try their prototypes for yourself.
What's on
- All day
Open Coworking
Our space will be open from 8:30am - 6:00pm. Feel free to pop in whenever you'd like to get some work done, meet new connections, or learn new creativity tools.
- 9:00 am - 10:00 am
Morning Tea & Networking
Come grab a snack and make new connections across Swinburne and the innovation industry. We will have guests from startups, scale ups, agencies, and social enterprises ready to learn about each other's worlds.
- 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Flash Workshop: Creativity for Future Human Progress
Join Design Factory Melbourne's Learning & Teaching team for a fast, hands-on hour of futures and foresight in human-centred design. You'll pick up practical creativity tools you can apply to your own work immediately, no design experience needed.
- 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Lunch and Learn: Industry Q&A
Grab a catered lunch and settle in for an open conversation with people working across the innovation industry. They'll share where things are heading, what they wish they'd learned at uni, and answers to whatever you'd like to ask.
- 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Showcase: alt_uni
Our five Design Factory interns take the stage to present what they've spent 12 weeks working on: their concepts for what university could look like if we designed it from scratch. Come hear five different takes on the future of learning.
- 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Gallery Walk: alt_uni
Get hands-on with the ideas you've just heard about. Wander the space, try the prototypes for yourself, and chat with our interns about what they made and the thinking behind it.
Who we are
About Design Factory Melbourne
Design Factory Melbourne is Swinburne University of Technology's interdisciplinary innovation hub, and part of the Design Factory Global Network. We bring students, researchers and industry together to envision a better future and build it.
Our work spans 3 key areas:
The classroom - Hands-on, interdisciplinary learning where students tackle real challenges and build the creative confidence to work on problems that don't have a textbook answer.
The agency - Research and innovation services for organisations that want to explore new ideas, understand the people they serve, and turn insight into action.
The lab - Our space for experiments, where we prototype and test new ideas about how people learn, work and create, including alt_space.
About alt_space
The latest experiment to come out of the lab... alt_space is meant to occupy the third space, somewhere between school and work, where students, researchers and industry professionals work together on problems too big for any one discipline.
alt_uni is its first program, a 12-week residency in which students from across Swinburne explore what an alternative university could be and build artefacts that bring their ideas to life.
The showcase: alt_uni
Five Design Factory interns, five takes on the university that deserves to exist in the world:
Failure as teacher. What if universities celebrated failure as our greatest teacher, and helped change society's relationship to it?
Emotionally intelligent citizens. What if universities owned their role as a cultural bottleneck, responsible for graduating emotionally intelligent people as well as knowledgeable ones?
The student as the main character. What if a degree were modeled more like a transformative story arc with the student at its centre, instead of a curriculum checklist?
Built for an uncertain future. What if universities stopped packaging and transferring today's knowledge, and equipped you to adapt to whatever comes next?
Building the industry you wish to see. What if instead of preparing to compete for the same jobs and internships we focused our university journey on creating our own job?
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