Design touches every aspect of our lives.

We all interact with design every day. With appliances at home, in our cars and public transport, holding a fork or getting dressed.

Design is not just about appearance, but how something performs. Whether it’s a hand held appliance or an urban scale precinct, the shape, colour and material of something may catch our eye initially. But the benefits of good design are measurable. In reduced workplace injury, stress and illness, increased productivity and social cohesion, in crime prevention, micro climate comfort, better access, reduced building maintenance and lifecycle costs.

Design can also be a way of approaching difficult social, environmental or economic challenges. Increasingly, design is being understood as a means of delivering ‘break through’ thinking in health care, the challenge of successful aging in our community, retrofit for our cities in the context of a carbon constrained future.

Design can act as a tool to translate ambition into action for public benefit. Design plays a role in reducing car dependency, promoting exercise & wellbeing through safe and inviting open space to tackle obesity and lifestyle disease, and increasing the opportunity for learning through great schools and university spaces.

Research shows that how something is designed dictates how well it performs. Well designed public places, streets, buildings, parks and city infrastructure add positively to the quality of our lives. Poorly designed places can be unsafe, economically run down, unattractive and unsustainable. Good design costs. Bad design costs more.

By working with partners across public and private projects the Integrated Design Commission will apply evidence-based design, planning and development expertise to its advice.

To aid design teams, their clients, local Councils and state agencies, the Integrated Design Commission is developing practical resources and publications to illustrate best practice design principles that can be applied to projects in South Australia. These publications will be publicly available on the Commissions’ website as a resource to the community.