The QUT Design Lab was founded in 2016 to employ bold, fresh, and rigorous design-led research.
As our world gets increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain, we need ideas, innovative collaborations and imagination – the ability to reshape what is and conceive, create, and design things that don’t yet exist. That is the mission and vision of the QUT Design Lab: to reimage and redesign our future. We create impactful change, applying our creative mindsets in three core domains: (1) industry and advanced manufacturing; (2) health; and (3) the built environment.
We are a collaborative, cross-disciplinary community of designers, engineers, roboticists, creative thinkers, makers, artists, health practitioners and innovators, who work together to speculate, imagine, design, and innovate. We are a catalyst for new thinking and drive technological innovation through design-led approaches, with our research privileging end-user engagement, sustainability, cross-disciplinarity, and industry collaborations. We ask how tools, methods and approaches from design and creative practice foster world-changing ideas and innovation in different settings – industry, manufacturing, healthcare, public spaces, and urban and regional places. We create, test, and deploy prototypes with collaborators across industry, government, and community and our imaginative, thought-provoking and high impact research.
Our mission is ‘Change by Design’, focused around two core programs:
Emerging Technologies
Lead by:
-
Dr Levi Swann
Levi Swann (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design within the School of Design, Queensland University of Technology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring the complex interactions that take place among humans, technology and their broader environments. Current focus areas are the design of health wearables using additive manufacturing, human...
Design for Health
Lead by:
-
Dr Jeremy Kerr
Dr Jeremy Kerr is the study area coordinator and a lecturer for the Interactive and Visual Design Program, and a design practitioner with over 20 years industry experience. He is also a co-leader of the QUT Design Lab’s Design Education platform. Jeremy’s research focus lies in the exploration and development...