Staff Profiles

Selena Griffith is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design Studies at COFA. She coordinates the Design Management and Practice courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Originally qualifying for a Bachelor of Industrial Design Honors, Selena has worked as a Design Manager in a variety of contexts from in house to international consultancy and as a freelance designer with her own consultancy.

Selena researches in Design Management, Sustainability, Collaboration, Social Innovation, Futures and Education. Her interest in creating positive futures through transformative design thinking as led her to produce teaching tools and methods to assist with the development of innovation, collaboration and design thinking skills. Selena is very interested in how organisations can most effectively utilise design thinking to deliver more sustainable products and services. Co-creation and nexus - where people from different backgrounds and professions come together in collaborations that result in innovation or new perceptions has fascinates Griffith and she not only researches in this area but has also developed courses to teach the skills needed to run multidisciplinary creative collaborations.

Griffin Kiteboarding www.griffinkiteborading.com is a current project exploring design management through models of practice remote from manufacture and usage of flat distribution and guerrilla marketing and branding in the arena of extreme sports hardware provision.

Social Innovation Sydney www.socialinnovationsydney.org. It a project co-founded by Kate Carruthers, Selena Griffith and Michelle Williams, directors of Creation Nation. The goal is to create events for changemakers to meet, network, workshop and engage in broad social issues to innovate creative solutions. These events include Bar Camps, Unconferences, Screenings with panel discussions, Start Up camps and special industry specific social innovation labs.

LiveFutures 2020 www.livefutures2020.com is an ongoing collaboration between Selena Griffith and Janine Cahill of Future Journeys. It is a futures festival aimed and bringing together engaged practitioners from diverse disciplines to engage in discourse around global sustainability issues. Selena is a co-director of this annual festival. The festival is usually held at the nexus of Sydney Design and National Science Week each year and is included as an official event of both.

FutureStory www.futurestory.com.au is an ongoing project recording professional and lay perceptions of what the future may be. Griffith is the Executive producer of this collaboration between COFA students, VibeWire, and Future Journeys. FutureStory was an official Sydney Design 2010 event.

Think Tank is a yearly teaching and learning collaboration Griffith coordinates between COFA students and students from the Regents Business College London. Students from disparate disciplines explore sustainability through common projects via a site designed and programmed by Griffith.

DESIS is an initiative of Ezio Manzini, Polytechico Milan. The project aims to link Social Innovators with Design Educators in order to produce ‘real’, rather than hypothetical, design projects for students to tackle. It is hoped that through the running of these projects and the exhibition, and possible application of the outcomes that some Global issues may be resolved.

Griffith has recently been awarded a Future Leaders Award from the World Human Resources Development Congress and will be speaking at their annual conference in Mumbai 2011

Griffith is:
A Fellow of the European Academy of Design
A Member of the Design Management Institute
An Executive member of the Society for Responsible Design  HYPERLINK "http://www.srd.org.au" www.srd.org.au
The Coordinator of the COFA Annual 2009 – 2011
A Planning Committee Member of the UNSW Women in Research Network
A Alumni of the UNSW Academic Women in Leadership program.
An Alumni of the UNSW Early Career Research program
The OHS Committee Representative for School of Design Studies COFA
A Participant in the multiple Learning and teaching technology trials