Masters in Design in Australia

Further your passion for social work and expand your career opportunities with professional accreditation, recognised by the Australian Association of Social Workers.

The Master of Design provides new skills for industry leaders of tomorrow. The Strategic Design specialisation will introduce you to the role of design for achieving a strategic advantage in the marketplace. In this degree, you will learn how to use design as a method for developing products, services and systems that meet social, environmental or commercial goals within business, organisations and technology contexts.

You will explore design principles, tools and methods that can be implemented to influence strategic decision and direction, as well as what it means to be a design leader and the impact that design leadership can have within organisations. You’ll be engaged in both analytical and creative thinking, and acquire broad skills in communication, information literacy, inventiveness and critical thinking.

In a rapidly transforming profession, designers need to be constantly developing innovative skills and knowledge to respond and be a leader in their field.

Positioned at the intersection of several creative disciplines our Master of Design provides you with the platform to explore advanced principles in contemporary design that will enhance your design practice and provide you with the platform to be an innovative leader.

This project-based and studio focused course offers you the opportunity to extend your learning within a specialisation area of interaction design, multimedia design or collaborative design. Alternatively, you can choose from a range of units from across these three areas to construct a specialisation in Advanced Study in Design.

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Central to this course is four core design studios that will engage you with design systems, services, processes, environments and objects.  In addition to the core design studios, you will undertake studies in Design Thinking allowing you to analyse real-world challenges through design thinking strategies and approaches.  Further studies will build your capabilities in design research, management and entrepreneurialism and culminating in an exegesis.

This program is ideal for people with an undergraduate degree in any discipline who are keen to enter the expanding fields of professional design engagement, or for design practitioners aiming to upgrade their expertise.

Choosing the advanced studies in design specialition, you can construct an individual program of study from across interaction design, multimedia design and collaborative design. This enables you to tailor your unit choices while addressing the fundamental principles of advanced design practice and thinking. It’ll inspire you to connect research and practice across the design disciplines, and to become a thoughtful design practitioner. You’ll broaden your knowledge of key design constructs, deepen your professional learning in design areas of interest, and advance your capacity as a design professional.

Collaborative design places you conceptually and practically at the intersection of interior, graphic and industrial design practice. The program will set you design challenges involving image, text, products, narratives, systems, services, public and private space, materiality and virtuality. You’ll develop independent conceptual and practical design skills alongside an ability to be part of collaborative design processes. You’ll expand your awareness across design disciplines; develop multidisciplinary design expertise; and build broader skills in leadership, professional adaptability and complex project planning.

The interaction design specialisation develops your skills in the design of contemporary artefacts, products and services that engage with interactive, user-focused technologies and processes. These can include, but aren’t limited to, health and medical equipment, ‘smart’ furniture, educational toys, wearable technologies, information kiosks and transport systems. You’ll use a diverse range of interactive processes, including the application of advanced technologies; electronics and programming; physical and virtual interface manipulation; engineering and material fabrication; and rapid prototyping. The specialisation gives you an understanding of the relationship between interactive activities, products and human behaviour.

Multimedia design develops your skills in digital communication environments. This includes designing for the web; motion and animation; and interactive touchscreen devices and surfaces. Emphasising an advanced knowledge of existing and emerging digital design processes and systems, this specialisation embraces projects of varied scale, from hand-held smart devices to large public interactive screens. It develops your ability to build a communication narrative; use multimedia processes to fill community and business needs; and understand the end-user’s engagement with projects or products such as websites, apps and other screen-based media.