The Practice Foundations Series

About us
Who we are

About ThinkPlace

Our People

Meet the change makers

How we work

Understand the ThinkPlace way of working
Services
Communication Design

Research & Insights

Education & Capability Building

Scaling & System Change

HCD & Service Design

Social Behaviour Change

Co-Design & Social Innovation

Strategy & Policy Design

Leadership & Culture
Communication Design

When it comes to creating strong engagement, it is important to know your audience so you can create a compelling narrative that captures the imagination and builds a shared desire for change. Creating powerful communications and a strong brand is essential to make impact.

Research & Insights

To best understand a complex problem, we must go directly to the people who are closest to it and who hold the strongest motivation to address it. Our designers bring deep expertise in qualitative and quantitative research to produce profound human insights. Through academic level research in real-world, rapidly-evolving contexts, we generate compelling insights that inform strategic evidence-based decision-making.

Education & Capability

We are living in a highly transitional and disruptive period. The challenges we face are more complex and interconnected than ever. To rise to these challenges, organisations must develop and implement new capabilities, technologies, and ways of working while many face capacity shortages, and widespread cognitive overload. Education providers must rethink curriculums, the student experience, and the value proposition for teachers to remain impactful into future.

Scaled System Change

There’s a lot that urgently needs to change in our world. We need change at scale, not piecemeal efforts. ThinkPlace has been seeking to master design in complex systems for nearly two decades, developing a toolkit for scaled system change that we’ve applied to some of the world’s biggest challenges. We enable exploration of systems through human perspectives, map relationships, constraints and opportunities, and identify viable pathways and initiatives to shift systems over time. Through highly effective brokering of disciplines, rapid sense-making and problem framing, and portfolio of experimentation, we engage ecosystems for change.

HCD & Service Design

We wholeheartedly believe in the principle that those for whom we design must be those with whom we design. As human-centred design (HCD) practitioners, we believe this because we know it works. HCD is a co-creative approach to problem-solving that places the people at the centre of the design process.

Social and Behaviour Change

Many of the challenges we face globally can be traced back to human behaviour, yet it’s not always clear why humans do the things that we do. In fact, scientists estimate that over 90% of behaviour is subconsciously motivated – influenced heavily by context and cognitive biases, and therefore often cannot be explained by logic alone. For this reason, conventional research methods like interviews and focus group discussions are insufficient in uncovering the core, underlying drivers of human behaviour.

ThinkPlace’s social and behaviour change (SBC) practice is committed to transforming human behaviour by deeply understanding what drives behaviour and deploying interventions and tactics that draw on psychology and behavioural economics to shift that behaviour in a constructive, sustainable way.

Innovation

Innovation continually disrupts and reinvents the fundamentals of how things work.

As with all disruptions, digital has created a mix of risk and opportunity that can’t be ignored. When digital innovation is well-connected to societal trends, strategic imperatives and the needs of people and communities, it delivers impact that transforms organisations, changes lives and powers a more sustainable future.

Strategy & Policy Design

The strategy and policy design service develops strategic or policy direction and charts the course towards that direction. A sharp sense of who you are and where you are heading is a powerful tool to give focus and align effort for increased effectiveness.

Leadership & Culture

Around the world governments, consortia, and organisations and assembling teams of highly-talented people to tackle wicked problems in high-pressure environments. Many of these teams fail for complex but preventable reasons.

These highly talented teams and individuals tend to be highly skilled with a clear sense of purpose, and push themselves to limits others simply are unable to achieve. This passion can drive people to keep pushing at this intensity for extended periods of time, especially when faced with a grand challenge, such as those in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Course Guide 2025

1- and 2-day courses centred on the foundations of design for public good, ideal for teams who want to add some new tools to their toolkit.

Build a strong foundation in key skills related to design thinking, co-design, service design, and innovation. Talk to us about a Practice Foundations course for your team if:

You’re new to design thinking and curious about how it could enhance your work.
You’re already on the design journey and looking to take your knowledge to the next level.

Design thinking skills are immensely valuable for a wide range of sectors, roles, and contexts. If your job involves problem-solving, these Practice Foundations are for you!

Choose from our four popular courses:

Course 1: Intro to design within complex systems

Knowing where to start when solving big problems can feel overwhelming. With the right tools and an understanding of what matters most to people, we can quickly create solutions that improve experiences.

In this course, we will demonstrate that creating change isn’t rocket science. We will outline a process for developing a holistic view what people need, and uncover methods for developing thoughtful, targeted interventions.

Suited to those interested in building an understanding of human-centred design and system change fundamentals, participants can expect to walk away with a new insight into the world and how to make change in a meaningful yet practical way.

Topics covered include:

Key mindsets and what it means to be a designer.
Key concepts to understand the systems we work in.
Key design and systems tools for your design practice.

Price: $950 per person (excl. GST), with group discounts available.

Duration: 1 day.

Course 2: Unlocking your inner innovator.

Responding to future challenges requires a new generation of innovators. We believe everyone has the power to be a positive force for change and our goal is to help empower those on a mission to do things differently. In this fast-paced session, you will learn to better understand your inner innovator and build confidence with fresh ideas to apply your thinking.

This course is suited to those who want to uncover their own personalised approach to innovation.

Topics covered include:

Understanding who you are as a designer.
Developing a design process.
Understanding and framing a challenge.
Sense-making and generating insights.
Generating possibilities.
Bringing a concept to life with prototyping
Sharing and testing.

Price: $500 per person (excl. GST), with group discounts available.

Duration: Half a day.

Course 3: Using visual design to tell stories

Does the thought of having to create anything visual make you shudder? Do you insist you ‘don’t have a creative bone in your body’?

We believe everyone has the power to craft engaging visual narratives. In this half-day course we’ll help you shift from ‘sharing information’ to ‘telling a story’ and get you thinking about how to design your message in a visually compelling way.

Suited to those wanting to learn basic graphic design principles, typography tips and tricks and storytelling structures to gain confidence to create visual outputs that people will want to engage with.

Topics covered include:

The power of visual narratives.
Creating a narrative for your audience.
Creating visual hierarchy.
Bringing information to life.
Giving your content structure.

Price: $500 per person (excl. GST), with group discounts available.

Duration: Half a day.

Course 4: Activating change in complex systems

Working within complex systems is a necessity for those looking to drive long-lasting change. But the ways we do that can result in unpredictable outcomes when we don’t have a targeted approach or a good sense of how the system might react. In this course, we provide the conditions to develop your ability to sense and respond to signals within complex systems. You will experiment with new approaches, build a more holistic perspective, and think critically about how best to work with, not against, the system.

Suited to experienced practitioners seeking to better understand the potential impacts of different targeted interventions.

Topics covered include:

Deeply exploring the systems you work in/with.
Enriching narratives about our systems using “system dynamics”.
Articulating your vision for the system.
Good and bad uses of system maps.
How to choose, implement, and test targeted interventions for your unique context.

Price: $1,650 per person (excl. GST), with group discounts available.

Duration: 2 days.

Course details

$500-$1,650 per person (excl. GST).

Cost

Group discounts available.

early bird cost

Half-day, 1-day, and 2-day options.

DURATION

For groups of 2 or more.

max Class size

Flexible locations- online or in-person.

location

Designed to fit your schedule.

when

Talk to us about subsidised tickets if cost is a barrier.

scholarships

Enquire now

Arrange a course for your organisation

We flexibly arrange these courses for groups of 2 or more people from an organisation. Contact us today to set one up!

Let's talk

Who we are

Our People

How we work

Communication Design

Research & Insights

Education & Capability

Scaled System Change

HCD & Service Design

Social and Behaviour Change

Innovation

Strategy & Policy Design

Leadership & Culture