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.

Maternal anxiety and depression are major public health issues with prevalence as high as one in five women. There is a need to focus on preventative strategies to enable women to self-monitor their mental health status during pregnancy and postnatally. To co-design and test a perinatal mental health digital tool to enable women to self-monitor their mental wellbeing during pregnancy and early parenting and promote positive self-care strategies. A sequential mixed methods study utilising two stages 1) co-design workshops; 2) fit for purpose pilot with women through a purpose designed survey to evaluate acceptability, useability, functionality, and satisfaction. Mothers, midwives, design researchers and students, participated in co-designing a digital tool and prototype application, YourTime. Fourteen participants engaged in the pilot, with all women agreeing that the tool would be beneficial in alerting them to changes in mental wellbeing. Seventy-seven percent agreed that this prototype had the potential to positively affect wellbeing during the perinatal period. The need to develop a perinatal mental health digital tool that enables women to self-monitor their wellbeing was identified. Women reported the YourTime app offered an acceptable and effective means to self-assess and monitor their wellbeing. The YourTime app responds to the growing agenda for digital approaches to address perinatal mental health challenges. The pilot study demonstrated that the app offered potential to alert women to changes in mental wellbeing, but functionality need further development.