Designing Out Crime research centre (DOC) is a partnership between the NSW Department of Justice and the University of Technology Sydney.
Our mandate is to bring design innovation to complex crime and social problems.
We work with partners from government, community, industry and academia in a co-design approach that is highly customised to our partners’ needs.
We also teach the next generation of designers and change makers in our undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
Our close-working team has wide-ranging expertise in fields spanning design, architecture, criminology, psychology, philosophy, history, urban planning and sociology.
At DOC we use a design innovation methodology called Frame Creation to find the problem behind the problem.
The Frame Creation methodology has been developed at DOC following research by director Kees Dorst into how the world’s leading designers solve problems.
This methodology is structured to allow us, together with our partners, to investigate a problem deeply and thoroughly – to ‘take a walk around the problem’ – before contemplating solutions.
Method cards are a great aid to problem solving. Defining the problem, creating solutions or testing ideas – there is a method to help each of these along the way.
DOC has created over 30 cards detailing the methods we use, all tried and tested in live projects. Click on one of the samples below to see how they work.
“What [we do] is create a new context for people to solve problems in. By using different metaphors, using analogies, using creativity, not so much to come up with a solution but to come up with a better formulation of the problem in a different area; that helps to shift people’s thinking into areas where the problem that was always unsolvable is suddenly solvable.”
Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution
Kees Dorst, Nigel Cross
We teach and practice our Frame Creation methodology.
Get in touch to find out how we can help with your problems.
Comparing paradigms for describing design activity
Kees Dorst, Judith Dijkhuis
Design Problems and Design Paradoxes
Kees Dorst
Our UK partners
Tasman Munro’s work with Intensive Learning Centres for prisons.
Kees Dorst – how design thinking can reframe problems.
A little about our UK partners Design Against Crime research centre, at the University of the Arts in London.
Anne-Marie Elias’ on rethinking collective impact on disadvantage.
Our yearly winter school – an intensive student collaboration program across disciplines.
Can Frame Innovation Save the World?
A Non-Designer’s Review of Kees Dorst, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design
Beyond the Bollard: Design to Beat Terror
Interview with RN's Blueprint for Living on our work on counter terrorism.
