G’day… and happy new year! I hope everyone managed to have a fun break and you’re feeling ready for all the fun 2025 will bring 😃
It’s been amazing watching the design thinking community grow over the past 9.5 years since we started Sydney Design Thinking (SydDT) in 2015. The community has grown beyond Sydney over the years as people have moved around…
To be more inclusive of the design thinking community beyond Sydney, the name of the Linkedin group is now Australia Design Thinking (AusDT).
The purpose of the Australia Design Thinking (AusDT) Linkedin group is to share design thinking (and related) events, news, articles, and other inspiration. An online place to stay in touch and continue conversations.
AusDT’s purpose is to build a connected community and ecosystem of people from a diverse range of design and business practices, industries, contexts, and roles… to learn, share, and get exposed to what’s possible.
We’re proud to see this in our community – our members are experience designers, researchers, service designers, startup founders, product managers/owners, consultants, academics, anthropologists, architects, software engineers, project managers, medicos, engineers, and many other roles.
Our vision is design thinking is used as a human-centred design and living systems approach to innovation and solving complex problems – to help create great outcomes for people, our planet, and business.
Sydney Design Thinking (SydDT)
SydDT is a diverse community of 9,700+ members. We’ve been meeting monthly since June 2015 and we’ve had 100+ meetups. We’re one of the top design thinking meetups globally.
We’ve got a big year planned for SydDT including our 10th birthday. On 13 February, Alan Chen and Diana Ayoub from Sh8peshifters kick things off with a visual thinking workshop.
The SydDT organising team is Ben Pecotich, Kylie Mageropoulos, Kate Linton, and Lucas Mara.
Adelaide Design Thinking (AdlDT)
We’re also excited to be launching Adelaide Design Thinking (AdlDT)! The community grew to 100+ members in the first three weeks – and our first meetup on 20 February is already sold out with a bunch of people on the waitlist.
The focus of our first meetup will be to explore the vital role of design in South Australia and co-design what the community wants from this meetup.
I’m stoked to be collaborating with Natasha Ballantyne, Maria Raymond, John Robinson, Monique Moushis who are Adelaide locals to help convene AdlDT.
Meetup Format
We usually start with about 45 minutes of networking with drinks and pizza before jumping into the content. We use a mix of formats for the content of the meetup and generally keep this to no more than an hour.
Content includes talks (ranging from 10-45 minutes), fireside chats, panels, open space, and interactive workshops on a broad range of topics – with a healthy Q&A that often turns into a group discussion.
Then there’s more networking, usually at a nearby pub.
Find out what’s coming up, express interest in being a speaker or sponsor, and see write-ups, photos, and recordings of past meetups.
New members are welcome!
Game on for 2025! I look forward to seeing you at a meetup soon…
