Mel Coombes
Mel Coombes
Melinda Coombes is an award-winning communication design practitioner, educator, and researcher with extensive experience in tertiary design education. She is a Lecturer in the Communication Design program at MADA and is the Unit Coordinator for Packaging Design. Her professional and academic trajectories converge at the intersection of creative practice, business enterprise, and pedagogy.
Melinda's curriculum development at MADA is heavily informed by over 25 years of practice-led experience in integrated branding and strategic communications; design thinking, human-centred design, and design research methodologies; and waste recovery, zero waste and circular economy initiatives. She specialises in: Sustainable Design Practices – embedding 'designing out waste' frameworks into design curricula; Industry Engagement – developing and facilitating high-impact, interdisciplinary live briefs and university-industry collaborative projects; and Student-Centric Frameworks – previously incorporating graduate employability overlays into work integrated learning, social enterprise and professional practice units, and developing a design-led graduate employability program for the creative industries.
Integrating deep insight into the business of design, Melinda’s pedagogical approach navigates the collaborative complexities of innovation ecosystems and addresses the vulnerability inherent in creative processes. Her methodology draws on training in strengths based positive psychology, actively fostering inclusive, psychologically safe cultures that optimise student wellbeing and creative risk-taking.
As a director of the branding and visual communications agency coowhi studio, Melinda blends research, design, and technology to craft impactful connections between audiences, products, and services. Her commitment to driving positive social, economic, and environmental change is reflected in advisory roles, speaking engagements and client partnerships across the government, corporate, and not-for-profit sectors. Globally recognised, published, and exhibited, her design output is held in permanent public collections, including the Powerhouse Museum and the National Archives of Australia.