Event Details

DESIS-lab Melbourne had the great pleasure of hosting a panel discussion to coincide with Dominic Campbell's visit to Melbourne on the 21st May 2013. Dom is the Director of Futuregov, UK, leading the way on using digital technology to improve the public services. This article in The Guardian gives a good snapshot of their recent work.

A brief intro to Dom's talk:

"Social innovators and public sector reformers are increasingly drawn to the use of digital and design as a way to transform public services from the inside and out. However so far many of these emerging (great) ideas lack the scale of impact they could and should have. It's now time to focus less on creating more and more good ideas, and instead on taking the best of those ideas and the social innovation experiments to the next level. Go big or go home - the world can't wait."

Following Dom's talk, an illustrious line up of panelists discussed general topics on design and social innovation in the public sector.

Darren Sharp: Darren Sharp is the Australian Editor of Shareable, the online magazine that tells the story of sharing. Darren has a background in social research and consulting having led a number of Gov 2.0 initiatives for state and federal government clients including Australia Post, VicHealth and the Gov 2.0 Taskforce. Darren spent years as senior researcher with the Smart Services CRC where he undertook research into communications policy, Internet futures, peer production and user-led innovation. A sharing economy evangelist, Darren is passionate about citizen engagement, social innovation, p2p systems, the commons and sustainable cities.

Adrian Pyle, Director - Relationships Innovation at Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. He is interested in enduring and universal themes within the great spiritual traditions, philosophies and models of change. He has a particular interest in Theory U and how "U shaped process" is a metaphor for those universal themes. His work involves him in a range of projects and experiments which help people get immersed in various stages of the U process and through this allow them to appreciate life as a spiritual experience (rather than spirituality as an "add on" to life). These projects and experiments include a fledgling responsible travel and learning journeys business, work in the area of relocalising and cooperatising businesses, neighbourhood co-working and maker space experiments, neighbourhood meals experiments and crowd and community funded energy reduction initiatives.

Damien Melotte, partner in System Reload. System Reload is a Strategic Design consultancy that is passionate about building thriving organisations that can adapt to disruptive change in the relationships age. Their approach is a combination of Service Design, Customer Experience, Digital and Social Business.Damien has worked with a range of public, private and Non Government Organisations in project design, social innovation, trends analysis, customer experience, strategic design, business strategy development, tactical tool development and workshop facilitation. Damien supports organisations to distil complexity through visualising and unravelling problems and working through a collaborative process to develop solutions.

Lucinda Hartley is an award winning designer who is passionate about cities, and developing new approaches to urban revitalisation that are faster, cheaper and more fun. Trained as a Landscape Architect, Lucinda spent two years working in slum communities in Vietnam and Cambodia before launching CoDesign Studio: a non-profit social enterprise, committed to helping disadvantaged communities to envision, design and implement neighbourhood improvement projects. Since its inception in 2010, CoDesign has delivered projects across five countries in Asia Pacific and engages over 500 volunteers. Lucinda is also an elected representative to the UN-Habitat Youth Advisory Board, focusing on how to engage young people in city making, and was a 2010 Youth Action Net Global Fellow. Her work in design and community development has been widely recognised including being recently listed in The Age Melbourne Magazine as one of Melbourne’s ‘Top 100’ most influential people.

Dominic Campbell, Founder of Futuregov. Dominic is a digital government and social innovation entrepreneur with a strong background in policy, communications and change management.

The panel discussion was moderated by Yoko Akama, leader of DESIS-Lab Melbourne, Service Design Network Melbourne and Acting Research Leader of Design Research Institute, RMIT University. This forum was nested within a broader program of the Design Research Institute Convergence Exhibition, open from 2nd - 24th May 2013 at RMIT Design Hub.