The role and responsibilities of our creative Higher Education are evolving in our ever-changing society. Systemic design thinking equips our design students with the means to promote sustainable development objectives via engagement, community building and discourse. This study reflects on interdisciplinary resource recovery projects for the City of Adelaide (CoA) during a final-year systemic design course in the Product Design programme at the University of South Australia. Since 2015, the core design team has collaborated with external partners outside of HE sectors, including NGOs, local councils, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government and the South Australia (SA) government, to promote social innovation towards sustainability. Systemic design is one of the core courses of the Bachelor of Design, Product Design programme within the faculty of Creative, University of South Australia. In this course, system thinking combined with project-based learning (PBL) was adapted and illustrated to demonstrate good systemic design practice for social innovation. This study was focussed on how we can collaborate on a variety of interdisciplinary projects to contribute to the realisation of the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from a human-centred systemic design perspective.

This chapter introduces methods and approaches for design thinking as the main drivers in developing the ability to identify critical problems in a given situation. This problem identification represents the opportunities for design intervention and creative solutions to a range of possible scenarios and practical applications. The chapter also develops the students’ understanding of design as an iterative process involving empathy, ideation and prototypes to test and evaluate concepts and solutions to a wide variety of identified problems.

Caregivers’ perceptions of children’s pickiness are relatively scarce in relation to the five core food groups and their importance in providing a nutritionally balanced diet. Furthermore, there is no validated questionnaire that examines child-reported food preferences in an age-appropriate manner, and the use of terms such as a “picky eater” can be attributed to environmental and genetic factors. Despite potential links between children’s food preferences and endophenotype bitter taste, associations between bitter taste sensitivity and picky eating is relatively unexplored. The proposed cross-sectional study aims to develop and validate a parent-reported core-food Picky Eating Questionnaire (PEQ) and child-reported Food Preference Questionnaire (C-FPQ) and simultaneously investigate environmental and phenotype determinants of picky eating. The study will be conducted in three stages: Phase 1, piloting PEQ and C-FPQ questionnaires (15–20 primary caregivers and their children aged 7–12 years); Phase 2 and 3, validating the revised questionnaires and evaluating the 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) bitter taste sensitivity to examine perception to bitter taste (369 primary caregivers and their children). Study findings will generate new validated tools (PEQ, C-FPQ) for use in evidence-based practice and research and explore picky eating as a behavioural issue via the potential genetic-phenotype basis of bitter taste sensitivity.