Have more impact. Design with ease.

The accredited Design Character course by Melis Senova, teaches you how to be an influential designer with clarity and confidence about your unique design practice.

Apply now →

Design that is human-centred includes not only what you bring to the table, but ‘who’ you bring to the table as well—character. This [course] helps people to become reflective and proactive in determining who shows up. — Harold Nelson, PhD

This course will help you build confidence and resilience in yourself and your design practice.

By choosing to be a designer, you are choosing to engage in work that directly influences how others interact with and perceive their world. Whether that is through the design of a product, policy, service or system, knowing the potentially far-reaching impacts of your work can be overwhelming, and the responsibility is great.

Your design character affects how all your design expertise impacts your work.

Design character describes the aspects of self that can be directly developed to increase your awareness, resilience and mastery in your work. Sometimes referred to as meta-skills, these are skills that sit behind your craft. They determine how you process the unique stresses that come with human-centred design work, support you to engage meaningfully in difficult conversations and navigate complex competing constraints.

Craft and character go hand in hand.

Nothing is more critical for those who are designing with others, than to have insight into who is actually doing the designing. You.

What you will learn

Although essential, Design Character is not regularly taught in design education. These meta-skills are the ones you lean on the most, they are operating in the background whether you know it or not, and they directly affect your performance in your job.

Understand meta-skills for design practitioners

Engage with the latest knowledge and tools sets relating to developing design character within yourself and your teams. Increase the resilience of your personal practice and that of your team so you can tackle complex situations together with confidence and clarity.

Make critical design judgments quickly

Design judgments are critical to mastering design within complex contexts and it depends solely on cultivating your design character. Learn about the nature of design judgments and gain access to the latest thinking on how to hone this skill.

Create your unique design character blueprint

Increase the resilience of your personal practice so you can tackle complex situations together with your colleagues, leaders and teams with confidence and clarity.

What you get

Those of you who participate and graduate from the Design Character course will receive the following:

One

A Design Character micro-credential

A certified micro-credential, that you can share on your LinkedIn profile.

Two

Elective credits for Masters of Design Futures students

This course is recognised by RMIT as an eligible elective for the RMIT Master of Design Futures program.

Three

You unique design character blueprint

You will develop and complete your own design character blueprint and accompanying methodology to reuse on yourself and your teams.

Four

Access to curated resources

You will ongoing access to articles and action experiments designed specifically to integrate design character into practice.

Five

Access to This Human Community

The course runs in a private space within This Human Community where you’ll get to learn together with other like-minded designers. Apart from video session, this is the only place you need to be during the course.

Six

A copy of This Human

You will receive a fresh new copy of this human as a reference.

How it works

The Design Character course is hosted completely on my This Human Community, which runs on the Mighty Networks platform. All the course content and messaging will be held on this platform in a private area alongside the main community.

Facilitated by Dr Senova

Personally designed and facilitated by Melis, based on more than 20 years experience working with designers, and as one.

Individual learning

Weekly reading and reflection tasks and build your knowledge and practice around cultivating design character.

Group learning

Weekly group zoom sessions with Melis as the facilitator to introduce new knowledge and explore new understanding.

Course project

Progressively build and applying their design character blueprint as they learn more and apply elements of design character to themselves.

Peer Support

This course creates opportunities to build meaningful relationships with other people who are also committed to an impactful career in design.

It was disruptive in a really great way, a really positive way. Due to the ability to stop and really self-reflect. Which is pretty rare these days. Professionally I started to see my interactions in a more layered and more nuanced way… it helped me communicate more effectively, and be more purposeful in my contributions. Ultimately I made a very good choice, I can always learn practical things but insights I’ve gained about myself have accelerated my development as a designer.

Darren McKenzie Head of Capability and Careers, RMIT. RMIT Masters of Design Futures Graduate

Application process

New dates launched!

Applications due 27-April-2023

Anyone who is currently in the field of design at any stage of their career will benefit from doing this work. Those who are not ‘officially’ practicing but are working adjacent to a design project currently are also invited to apply.

Steps

Click apply now to fill out the form and reserve your spot
Follow this link to join the this human community.
Click on Courses and select and pay for the next available course.

Investment

$1,950 AUD

Starting at 8:30 am, Thursday 4th May, 2023

1.5 hr/week zoom session with Melis at 8:30 am AEDT every Thursday for 8 weeks.
1 hr/week in small group sessions (optional).
up to 2 hours per week of individual learning, reading and reflecting.
Finishing 22nd of June 2023.