Emerging Technologies Research Lab

WonderLab at its heart is a pride of PhD candidates and supervisors from across a range of disciplines, cultures.

The WonderLab PhD cohort brings together an international research collective pursuing doctoral work through Monash University. Candidates are exploring practice-based research topics in design and learning through their individual professional practices. The cohort contribute to one another's research and projects through group collaboration, collective contribution and dissemination of research and a shared commons of tested methods, tools and research resources. Supervision is committed to the whole of the collective as well as individual work. Research is pursued and exhibited to include both the individual practice and collective research components of the cohort.

Learn more about Graduate research.

We design games, WonderBoxes, that promote hands-on, minds-on social interaction. These games have been created especially for organisations and communities as a way to give agency to participants to drive their own personal and professional growth. The nature of a game means that the direction, experiences and outcomes are not pre-prescribed. There is no expert determining what is of value to know. The peers contribute to and define the game and the end result. Because of this, the WonderBoxes offer a learning strategy that can be revisited, iterated, shared and mastered over time.

Design positions itself as operating in the realm of potential. Design is all about exploring new ways of doing things so we might craft different futures. We no longer find it relevant to think of a designer as someone who designs for a client but as someone who designs with community. To do this well we need to invite others into the process.

One way we do this at WonderLab is to invite communities to a playdate. We don’t invite people to experience some highly resolved learning experience. We are interested in the playdate as a space for negotiating, exploring, imagining. We invite people to join us in co-creating and critiquing what that half-baked learning experience could become.

To share work that is still in play, that is not-there-yet is to feel vulnerable. Which is a big ask in a public space. Yet it also seems apt. For the verb to wonder is also about being in a state of doubt...to wonder if, to wonder how, to wonder what...