Materialising insights for public healthcare in Australia
This project invites students to envision impactful ways to support innovation within Australia’s public healthcare system. Tasked with addressing complex challenges, such as overcrowded emergency departments, an ageing population, and gaps in mental health services, students have worked to translate insights into accessible formats that drive meaningful change in healthcare practices.
Operating within a highly regulated, resource-limited environment, healthcare providers often face barriers to innovation, including strict hierarchies, risk-averse cultures, and tight schedules. To overcome these, there was a focus on creating approaches, tools and resources that make innovation feasible, scalable, and sustainable. Approaches might include contextual mapping of current healthcare practices, envisioning ideal future scenarios, analysing global case studies to identify adaptable methods, or creating a comprehensive resource hub that blends quantitative and qualitative data.
The project emphasises the importance of an intersectional approach, incorporating diverse consumer, carer, and community perspectives to design solutions that are inclusive and responsive to a variety of needs. By employing trauma-informed and community-engaged processes, this project can help foster a culture of innovation that prioritises peoplecentered care and supports healthcare workers in transforming patient experiences and service delivery models across Australia’s public health landscape.
Open brief
The client works for a B Corp organisation – an ethically led design studio that brings together social experiences and technical change to grapple with complex futures. They often do a lot of propositionalbased work encouraging people to think about human connections within the ever-shifting complex and technical world. They are ethically led and inspired by ways of knowing that challenge the norm.
The company is looking for inspiring projects that can stimulate new thinking or practices that help society move toward more cohesive communities. In the context of division and disruption, the company is looking for ideas. They can be any context or topic. An example of the sort of topic the company is interested in is designs interventions in community cohesion (including aspects like cultural preservation, social transformation and intergenerational change).
The students were tasked with providing an innovative project that is: • Ethical • Demonstrates a pathway of change (perhaps it is creating change in a policy, people, or place) • Embodies and exemplifies different innovation techniques (for example, it could be new methods applied to existing or old-world problems, or existing innovation approaches that could be applied to new contexts)
Long-term Insights Briefng: Engaging the Australian community in conversations about the future
The Long-term Insights Briefings are a key initiative under the Australian Public Service (APS) Reform Agenda, designed to enhance policy development and future planning. These briefings aim to address complex, cross-cutting policy issues that may impact Australia over the medium to long term. To this end, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet seeks innovative approaches to engage diverse Australian communities in conversations about the future, allowing citizens to express their hopes, concerns, and perspectives.
This project targets a broad cross-section of the Australian public, aiming to spark dialogue and gather meaningful feedback. Key questions guiding the project include: how to engage various communities in forward-looking conversations on specific topics, how to showcase a spectrum of future possibilities in an accessible way, and how to effectively structure engagement for impactful insights. Additionally, the project seeks ways to present community feedback to inspire broader national participation in thinking about the future.
Deliverables may include a concept for an inperson “futures thinking” event, offering community members structured opportunities to explore and discuss visions for the future, and a digital platform allowing Australians to engage with virtual future scenarios and share their insights.
