Design & Creativity

Everything around us – every household item we touch, every website we visit, every bus or plane that takes us from A to B – was once an idea in someone’s head. And, with emerging technologies rapidly changing the way we interact with the world, those with both creative and technical skills are in a unique position to shape our future. By itself, STEM is a highly creative field. It takes imagination to come up with scientific experiments, solve complex engineering problems or find the answer to maths mysteries. But if you also find yourself scribbling designs or love building digital worlds, a career combining STEM with design might be for you. Creative skills can be a big bonus in STEM. Here’s how design thinking can power a super career DESIGN A WHOLE NEW WORLD Product design Product design is similar to industrial design, but focuses more on the design and prototyping phase. Product designers also tend to work on everyday and digital products, and need skills in user research, sketching and prototyping.

Gaming for good Thanks to the industrial revolution, we enjoy a high quality of life here in Australia. But there’s always room for improvement and creative STEM workers are busy making the world a better place all over the globe. For example, researchers in Switzerland found that patients in intensive care recovered faster after viewing nature imagery through a virtual reality (VR) headset. Game and interaction design is no longer just about creating the next Candy Crush. Simulated environments are a big part of training in industries like aviation and health. The same skills used in developing games can help a pilot or surgeon learn how to do their job – and that’s pretty important!

Interaction design Interaction Design (or IxD) is all about how people interact with technology in different environments. User research is at the core of what interaction designers do. They are also sometimes called user experience (UX) designers or web designers.

Know your customer You don’t need to disappear into a digital world to combine creativity and STEM. Those skills are needed in the real world, too, to design and produce physical objects. Designing for STEM industries is another pathway. For example, QUT industrial design students worked with Orange Sky, a mobile laundry service for the homeless, to design seating for clients to use while they waited for their washing. The chairs had to be functional, but they also had to be aesthetically on-brand – a very important consideration for designers of all kinds. Learning about the people who will ultimately use your designs (known as ‘end users’) is also an essential part of the process. Who knows what your next big idea will be?

Industrial design Industrial designers create or redesign products, services and systems. It might be anything from sustainable packaging to transport systems. Industrial designers need to be technically minded and be able to see both the big picture and the tiny details.

Choose your path

QUT has the widest range of design disciplines on offer across Australia, including tons of double degrees and opportunities to study overseas. Bachelor of Design students have seven majors to choose from at QUT. Students in all disciplines work on four Impact Lab units during their degrees, where the project themes and briefs are set by industry experts and focus on real-world problems.

Industry influence

First-year design students work with – and learn from – members of the industry on campus during a week-long design intensive. And at the end of the year, the Design Festival gives students a chance to showcase their work to industry and the public. Other degree options include the Bachelor of Games and Interactive Environments (with majors in Animation, Game Design and Software Technologies); the Bachelor of Creative Industries, which can be combined with IT or data science degrees; and the new Diploma in Esports. – Chloe Walker

DESIGN AND CREATIVITY + STUDY

Diploma in Esports (pathway program)

Bachelor of Design

(Interaction Design)

Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design)

Bachelor of Games

and Interactive Environments (Game Design)

Bachelor of Design

(Fashion)

DESIGN AND CREATIVITY + JOBS

Product designer

$52K–$108K

Industrial designer

$48K–$87K

Quality assurance (QA) tester

$49K–$99K

User experience (UX) designer

$58K–$109K

User interface (UI) designer

$51K–$100K*

*Source: salaries according payscale.com

First among champions

Michael Trotter’s passion for eSports led him to achieve a number of Australian uni firsts – including creating the first official eSports qualification

Career goals

Forget the couch potato playing games all day in the basement – today’s esports athletes are just as fit and focused as those on the sports field. That’s what Michael discovered in his PhD research into the psychology of esports. “There’s a misconception that esports is just video-gaming,” he says. “A lot of my work involves explaining that it’s an organised competition with teams and players, and that there are career pathways similar to traditional sports.” Michael was studying a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Psychology) at QUT when he and a friend decided to start an esports club. It launched in 2017 and, after just a year, the pair had convinced QUT to build Australia’s first university esports arena, where their team, the

michael trotter postdoctoral researcher

Sport psychology postdoc researcher,Umea University, Sweden

Diploma in eSports Coordinator, QUT

Co-Founder & Coordinator, QUT eSports

QUT Tigers, could train. They also had the club endorsed by the QUT Elite Athlete Program, meaning students could apply for a scholarship as an esports athlete. Michael’s latest achievement is launching Australia’s first accredited tertiary qualification in esports. The Diploma in Esports provides an introduction to the industry (which is worth $1 billion globally) and a pathway into a range of bachelor degrees. For the next level of his video-game adventure, Michael wants to run his own research lab and use esports to help support disengaged and at-risk young people: “The utility of STEM can take you places that you didn’t know were possible!” – Chloe Walker

@MikeyGTrotter

PhD in Esports, QUT

Bachelor of BehaviouralScience (psychology), QUT

@qutesports

Coding equality Kimberly Valenny is empowering the next gen of women in tech to chase goals and smash stereotypes

Kimberly’s motivation to study a Bachelor of Creative Industries/Bachelor of Information Technology at QUT came from looking around her high school classroom. “In a class of 16 IT students, I was the only female,” she explains. “That made me even more determined to get it done and do it right!”

Uniting women in tech When she wasn’t juggling the demands of her double degree, Kimberly was hard at

When you surround yourself with people who support you and have been in your shoes, you gain a feeling of confidence”

kimberly valenny graduate front-end developer

Bachelor of Creative Industries / Bachelor of Information technology, qut President of Women in Technology, QUT Undergraduate Intern, Deloitte Digital Faculty Student Ambassador and Sessional Academic, QUT

work as the president of the Women in Technology (WIT) student club, which welcomes anyone with a common aim to unite, inspire and empower women pursuing all sorts of tech fields.

Kimberly believes it’s important to find your STEM tribe: “When you surround yourself with people who support you and have been in your shoes, you gain a feeling of confidence.” – Louise Meers

QUT

kelvin o'shea product designer

Bachelor of Fine Arts (Interactive & Visual Design) / Bachelor of Information Technology (Information Systems), QUT Product Design Intern, Tanda Product Designer & Developer (Growth), Tanda

Product Designer (Clipchamp), Microsoft

Experience creator

Kelvin’s days are all about being creative and solving problems. As a product designer for Microsoft, his challenge is to make it easy for people to create videos with Clipchamp, a video-editing app. Yet when Kelvin started at QUT, he was a long way from his Information Systems major. “I never wrote a line of code until I was outside of high school,” he says. Kelvin combined a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Interactive and Visual Design) with a Bachelor of Information Technology (Information Systems) at QUT. Later, he realised QUT was more than just a place to go and study. It was there he met the founders of Tanda (and QUT graduates), a dynamic young company, and ultimately scored an internship in his third year before a full-time gig after graduating. The best part about working in tech? “I’m always creatively problem-solving,” Kelvin says. – Lauren Martin and Gemma Conroy Making apps easier to use is Kelvin O’Shea’s mission as a product designer

I never wrote a line of code until I was outside of high school”