The Social Innovator Dialogues, www.sidialogues.org.au, hosted some great meetings between Ezio Manzini and the Australian design community in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in July.

The aim of these meetings was to link the design community and particularly, design schools and institutions, in Australia with the broader DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Network, www.desis-network.org/, and to take the first steps towards an Australian node in this network.

There was a lot of enthusiasm and support for the concept at these meetings as well as some real concerns for the practicalities of how to build a network that crosses departmental, institutional and geographical lines.

The collaborators behind the Social Innovator Dialogues, TACSI (The Australian Centre for Social Innovation), ASIX (Australian Social Innovation Exchange) and the Centre for Social Impact are excited to support this fledgling engagement between Ezio Manzini, DESIS and the Australian design community and to that end we've shared some DESIS documentation and contact lists with participants at those meetings and started this thread on ASIX for the community to come together and work out what next steps are possible.

Concrete next steps:

Selena Griffiths from COFA (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) has offered to host a 2 hour session on Saturday August 14th as part of the Live Futures 2020 Festival in Sydney. So let's start the discussion about an agenda for that meeting and who is going to facilitate and bring it together..... the Australian DESIS Network is in your capable hands.