Professor Lisa Grocott is a design researcher who thrives on collaborating with interdisciplinary teams on individual and cultural transformation projects. After a decade at Parsons in New York, she currently leads the Future of Work and Learning research program in the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash University. In the US she worked with Grit, Belonging and Mindset researchers, in Australia she has collaborated with academic and industry partners in the learning sciences, education, organizational change and other creative methodologists. Lisa’s translational research is regularly published and has been awarded more than $2.5 million in funding. She was recently a CI on the ARC-funded Innovative Learning Environments and Teach Change linkage grant (ILETC) with collaborators at the University of Melbourne and is currently working on a book on Design for Transformative Learning for Routledge’s Design for Social Responsibility series. 

The Future of Work and Learning research program responds to the call for continuous learning, unlearning and reskilling through designing encounters and environments that are playful, welcoming, mindful and adaptive. Co-creating with educators, learners, workers and leaders, our applied research works with future-focused methodologies to unsettle out-of-date mental models, shift learning mindsets and envisage never-before-seen work practices and learning processes. Lisa is also currently the Director of WonderLab, a diverse interdisciplinary learning community within the Emerging Technologies Lab and the home for design and ethnography PhD candidates from five continents with a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds. 

Previously, Lisa has had decades of leadership experience including roles as the Dean of Academic Initiatives at Parsons in New York, Head of Design at Monash and Post-graduate Research Director at RMIT in Melbourne. Lisa was born and raised in Aotearoa, New Zealand with whakapapa to Ngāti Kahungunu on her mother’s side and Pākeha from Waikato on her father’s side. The indigenous and interdisciplinary lessons of her undergraduate education underpin the integrative, pluralistic and relational orientation of her co-creative, participatory research and practice.