At the end of 2018 I embarked on a Master of Design Futures at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). I remember at the time feeling restless about my role and my future and recalled my mother saying when she embarked on her masters that she felt she had to ‘get all in or all out’ and so she opted for the all in.

I had a sense there was more than the work I was doing as an experience design consultant and I had become increasingly interested human centred design and systems thinking and so I set off on the study journey, which may explain my silence here on my blog.

Storytelling became the focus for my research very early in my studies. Following an experience on a university redesign project I started to wonder – could stories help audiences feel the same empathy as researchers when sharing ethnographic research? And so began a research project that evolved from a divergent exploration of storytelling and how it is used in design, dance, film, documentary making and in leadership. I am naturally curious about how techniques from other creative disciplines can be used in human centred design and communicating design ideas.

We were encouraged to work towards a designerly outcome to our research project and because I love, use and always wanted to design a card deck that became my pursuit. Don’t worry though, there was a lot of design research that went into desirability and I definitely followed a human centred design approach.

I completed my final research project and exegesis in June this year and who knew that this decision to undertake a masters would come to shape me and my career. Since the end of 2018 I moved into the Australian Public Service heading up BizLab Academy as their Human Centred Design Academy Lead and now as the Assistant Director of Innovation at the Department of Education, Skills and Employment.

My beautiful Mum is not here to see this achievement but she would have loved that her words continue to guide me. I know she would have wanted a deck of her own.

They are available for purchase.

P.S. My mother’s masters was on integrating traditional indigenous ways of teaching in mainstream early childhood education.