Design for Social Innovation: A Systemic Design Approach in Creative Higher Education toward Sustainability

The role and responsibilities of our creative Higher Education are evolving in our ever-changing society. Systemic design thinking equips our design students with the means to promote sustainable development objectives via engagement, community building and discourse. This study reflects on interdisciplinary resource recovery projects for the City of Adelaide (CoA) during a final-year systemic design course in the Product Design programme at the University of South Australia. Since 2015, the core design team has collaborated with external partners outside of HE sectors, including NGOs, local councils, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government and the South Australia (SA) government, to promote social innovation towards sustainability. Systemic design is one of the core courses of the Bachelor of Design, Product Design programme within the faculty of Creative, University of South Australia. In this course, system thinking combined with project-based learning (PBL) was adapted and illustrated to demonstrate good systemic design practice for social innovation. This study was focussed on how we can collaborate on a variety of interdisciplinary projects to contribute to the realisation of the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from a human-centred systemic design perspective.