Projects
We work with external partners to configure projects for sustainable impact. We act as a research capacity for organisations by aligning our core values, and work together to create concrete, meaningful solutions with them.
Developing COVID Communication Strategies for CALD communities
This project leverages frameworks and methodologies from sociology, digital civics, behaviour psychology and implementation science to generate the new conceptual and empirical knowledge about how to communicate with CALD communities. It seeks to develop effective communication strategies and approaches that address community needs and support adherence to preventive measures (such as physical distancing, sanitising, and isolation) through the use of innovative digital engagement strategies that incorporate existing social communication channels.
Funded by: Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet
Parent’s Support of Youth Mental Health through COVID
This project aims to reduce the impact (and risk of longer term) adolescent mental health issues by enhancing their parents’ ability to support them during COVID-19 and beyond. We will involve parents in a process that will learn and respond to their changing needs, to dynamically adapt an evidence-based parenting program integrated with an online peer-support group for parents. This will empower parents and enhance their capacity to safeguard their children’s mental health and wellbeing.
Funded by: Medical Research Future Fund
Promoting Immunisation in Malaysia
Sub-optimal vaccination coverage along with a continued increase in the refugee population poses a significant public health challenge in Malaysia. There’s a need to increase vaccination rates among these marginalised populations, which contribute to equitable health and wellbeing. This project focuses on developing an accessible digital solution that will encourage the uptake of immunisations and support the large-scale collection of immunisation records among Malaysia’s refugee population.
Funded by: Monash University Malaysia
Micro-volunteering support
This project addresses the challenges faced by disabled citizens in Indonesia through the co-design, development and pilot deployment of an approach that enhances their social capital. This involves a micro-volunteering model that provides access to mentors who can offer help, support and advice. Mainstream communication technologies will be leveraged to facilitate volunteer mentors assembled in a small team around a disabled citizen, who will provide both reactive and proactive support.
Funded by: DFAT
PROTIC2: Empowering Women in Bangladesh
A five-year partnership between Monash University and Oxfam, this project seeks to empower communities across Bangladesh through innovative engagement with technology. The project focuses on digital citizenship for members of disadvantaged communities in Bangladesh, seeking to both articulate the impact of societal digital transformation initiatives on disadvantaged and low-literacy communities, and empower these communities through culturally-sensitive digital technologies. Current engaged communities include domestic workers and rural fisher-folk.
Funded by: Empowerment Charitable Trust
Global Classroom
Supported by the Monash-Warwick Alliance, the Global Classroom seeks to support rich case-based medical student training across interactional campuses through novel configuration of digital communication technologies. Working with health educators, established case-based learning (CBL) resources and learning analytics to better understand and optimise student learning and the online environment, the team will design and deploy a novel approach where students engage in CBL to solve a problem collaboratively using off-the-shelf mobile technology.
Funded by: Monash-Warwick Partnership
MyPACS Wellbeing
MePACS are partnering with researchers to talk to older people about their experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown; any changes they might have undergone and the ways they have stayed connected with other people. The project aims to improve the wellbeing of the people involved in the process as well as those in broader society, beginning to understand some of the challenges that older people are facing due to COVID-19.
Research Lead: Patrick Olivier
Digital Social Influence
With social media such a large part of people’s daily lives, this project examines how social influence generated in digital systems leads to attitudinal and behavioural change. Through a mixed methods approach including a systematic review, this project extends the theoretical perspective of ‘social influence’ to accommodate distinct characteristics of digital systems. It proposes recommendations for practitioners around using digital social influence for behaviour change in the rapidly-evolving online landscape.
Research Lead: Dharshani Chandrasekara
Community Voice in Commissioning
The process of creating and implementing international development projects is a complex environment with multiple stakeholders. This project explores how community voice can be embedded into the project commissioning process as a way to close the gap between the project proposal procedure and the communities in which the programs are implemented. Insights are based on rich engagement with the Bangladesh agricultural program sector and working in local communities.
Research Lead: Manika Saha
Cross Cultural Community Media
Participatory and community based media practices are now becoming practical and sustainable in International Development contexts. This project seeks to understand how the cultural and linguistic barriers in community-generated media can be addressed through technology while maintaining transparency and authenticity of community voice. By working with global NGOs such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and examining their current community practices, the project aims to understand and develop strategies to support operations such as translation in field contexts.
Research Lead: Meriem Tebourbi
Supporting Employee Voice
This project explores the ways digital systems and tools can facilitate the voice of employees and stakeholders, and their engagement in decision-making processes within an organisation or industry. The project aims to identify and conceptualise discourse characteristics of constructive discussion. This will inform a set of design goals for IT systems that support voice within organisations and facilitate meaningful action from employee engagement.
Research Lead: Dinislam Abdulgalimov
Unplatformed Design
This project considers existing social media technologies as material for design. Using this metaphor opens new potential for interaction design through the re-configuration and augmentation of social media, coined ‘un-platforming’. Through the lens of craftsmanship and materiality, this project will produce an in-depth, nuanced understanding of existing platforms as a material for design, and frameworks to apply such lessons in the design of systems.
Research Lead: Ran An
Coordinating Community Media at Live Sporting Events
Live sporting events are a key part of many community groups. This project explores how we can coordinate communities of non-professionals in producing media at these events and how organisations can configure themselves to be conducive to such production through the publication of existing metadata. By working closely with Racing Victoria, the project aims to develop and deploy tools that leverage existing capture and communication technologies, to support production of community content.
Research Lead: Siddhant Sharma
Digiverse
Mental health is a significant issue for young people. This project aims to understand the barriers that young people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds face when accessing online mental health services. The project will work alongside young people to co-design new content, training and peer support mechanisms that will increase the inclusivity of online mental health spaces for their community.
Research Lead: Roisin McNaney
DeMMI
This project explores the detection of mental health behaviours using mobile interactions (based on the AWARE framework). It is particularly focused on disordered eating behaviours and self-harm, with user self-reports on episode logging providing contextual understanding of mobile sensing data surrounding self-abusive episodes. The aim of this work is to inform future directions for context aware interventions for self-abusive behaviours that are personalised to the user.
Research Lead: Roisin McNaney
Exploring Place in Emergency Remote Learning
The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of schools has forced families to transition to school at home. Whilst unprecedented, it is likely to have a lasting impact on the perception of school, and the design and use of online, digital platforms to support schooling. Adopting online ethnographic methods, this project is developing an ecological understanding of the context and how the relations between people and places in and around the home have evolved over time.
Research Lead: Tom Bartindale