Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne

Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne brings together students, research leaders, industry partners and entrepreneurs to solve complex problems, generate innovative solutions and forecast future scenarios. It also provides an interdisciplinary platform for industry-engaged research.

The collaboration hub brings end-users, students and researchers together for early stages of product and service development to experiment with concepts and their potential value. 

Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne fosters innovation culture at the Swinburne Innovation Precinct, as well as in collaboration with other Swinburne initiatives such as the Factory of the Future and the Centre for Design Innovation. It plays a key role in developing partnerships across Swinburne’s research institutes and centres, and builds lasting relationships with external organisations. 

Industry collaboration with partners

Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne has delivered more than 100 interdisciplinary industry projects with more than 80 partners across diverse sectors, including national and international collaborations. Partners can be an organisation of any size or type, ranging from corporate to government to not-for-profit. 

 Successful collaboration awards between Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne and partners include: 

• Co-designing affordable solutions for people with disabilities: winner of Asia-Pacific Triple E Award for Innovation Challenge (for Design Factory Melbourne and TOM@University) 
• Fostering innovation culture: first runner-up of Asia-Pacific Triple E Award for Innovation and Collaboration Space of the Year 2019 (for Swinburne’s Innovation Hub) 
• Industry problem solving: finalist of BHERT Award 2019 for Outstanding Collaboration in Higher Education and Training (for Design Factory Melbourne)

How Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne works

At Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne, we are always looking for project partners to present a challenge to the team to create change in the form of new products, services or systems innovations. Through a design innovation process that includes idea generation, proof-of-concept, prototyping and testing, project teams provide creative solutions, visualise outcomes and develop prototypes for industry – all while being supported by cross-departmental teaching staff and researchers from Swinburne. 

Team members are given the freedom and resources to create genuine solutions, students gain new learning experiences through interdisciplinary and international activities, and project sponsors get access to teams of top-level students and leading scholars. 

We are one of three founding Design Factories 

Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne is one of the three founding Design Factories inspired by the world’s first Design Factory at Aalto University in Helsinki. Aalto Design Factory pioneered a radically new approach to teaching product and service development by bringing leading business and design scholars to future talent, and a mixture of companies together in a purpose-designed creative environment. 

The Design Factory Global Network consists of more than 30 factories across the world. Swinburne Design Factory Melbourne’s program also includes collaboration with the Stanford ME310/SUGAR Network and is founder of the Challenge Based Innovation Program A³ in partnership with IdeaSquare at CERN to accelerate ideas through collaboration, research and development prototyping, and experimental innovation.