About Me

Matt Norman is a designer and facilitator driven to make a positive social impact. He has over 7 years of experience running workshops in the corporate, government, non-profit and education worlds, as well as supporting the work of activists and community builders at a local level. A lifelong learner with a collection of degrees and a whole lot of training under his belt, Matt’s passion is creating systems and experiences that bring out the best in people.

Blog articles

Busting Social Change Myths

The world of social change is surrounded by many exaggerated stories and common misconceptions about how everything works and how change really happens. In this section, we investigate four of the most common myths about social impact, and help you to get a clearer picture of what this work actually looks like.

Social Impact

Design Jam: The Power of Design to Strengthen Local Communities

Earlier this month we had the pleasure of once more running our flagship design bootcamp, Design Jam. Over two big days, our participants took on the ambitious challenge of using the design thinking skills and tools they were learning to create solutions for real social impact problems.

Social Impact

Don’t Be a Heropreneur

While the heropreneur narrative is an alluring one, it’s crucial for social innovators to keep their focus on the real goal of making progress on big social issues for the good of people and planet. The real heroes in social impact are the unsung ones: the people striving together to solve the biggest problems in the world!

Social Impact

Cobras, India and Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a problem-solving approach that invites us to treat every problem as a system, made up of elements (such as a cobra population, a colonial government, and a largely poor population) and the relationships between them.

Systems Thinking

What we’ve learned in the shift to facilitating online

Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve had over 500 participants through our online workshops, including more than 150 fellow facilitators, designers and learners keen to share their insights about facilitating learning online. Check out the key learnings.

Facilitation

Sharing our love for design across Australia

Over the last three weeks, the Skills of the Modern Age team has been lucky enough to travel across Australia sharing our love of hands-on, fast-paced design and innovation learning. Our top three learnings from running innovation events and workshops from Brisbane to Adelaide and back to Perth!

Innovation

How might we Teach by Design?

We do a lot of capacity-building work in organisations, training adults in the essential design and innovation skills they need — but we also recognise that one of the best places to intervene for the future is in the education system.

Design

Stories from our Design Jam

Design thinking is a crucial skill set that can help us tackle some of the world’s most important problems; that’s why design skills are at the heart of almost all our learning programs. Design Jam uses design thinking to create a real solution for a real social impact problem in just two days!

Design

How to prototype your career as a social innovator

Becoming a social innovator doesn’t have to require the huge leap we often think it does. Social innovators exist in all kinds of organisations, from governments and big corporations through to small businesses and freelancers.

Social Impact