Matthew Cousins

Product Design Engineering

Hi! I'm Matt. With over seven years of experience in manufacturing and production, and a background in product design engineering, I like to balance my user-focused designs with industry experience and technical insights. My experience as a semi-professional basketball player and team captain has strengthened my skills in teamwork and leadership, which I bring into every project. Outside of design, I enjoy illustrating characters and playing guitar, always exploring new avenues of creativity. I've loved my time at Swinburne University of Technology, especially the hands-on project opportunities we've been able to undertake each year.

In my Final Year Project, I designed and built an adaptable handheld tool for Parkinson's disease patients, and other sufferers of hand tremors. Named the Adap.Tool, it utilises inertia in an innovative way to successfully minimise tremor magnitudes. It's simple magnet connection of attachments allows an infinite range of tools to be connected to the housing, such as pens, cutlery, keys, among others. This is a revolution within the similar product market. Being adaptable to common daily tasks, it has been designed with portability in mind, with all components fitting within pants pockets, as well as being attachable to keys, belts, handbags and more with a carabiner. It's sleek aesthetic has also been designed to minimise the anxiety and ridicule linked to the social stigma of medical conditions, and related assistive technologies.

Adap.Tool - Final Year Project

My final year project: An adaptable, handheld tool for sufferers of hand tremors. The design successfully minimises tremor magnitudes using inertia. It also has a modular design, allowing users to easily change the connected tool, from pens, cutlery, keys, and many more.

Adap.Tool - Final Year Project

Kuka - Sketching Robot

Design and programming of an end effector, in conjunction with Kuka Robotics and their iiwa robot. Designed to house a range of coloured pens, which could rotate precisely on command using Arduino programming, for an accurate and consistent drawing.

Glu - Glue Fun

A fun re-design of a standard product, with a specific archetype in mind. Glu was designed with aesthetics, safety, and ergonomics in mind.

Olá - Rapid Translation Device

Designed for the modern travelling businessman, Olá allows near real-time language translation, sent to the user's accompanying blue-tooth headphones using artificial intelligence. The sleek profile, clean aesthetic, and integrated clip and magnets were designed to fit anywhere on common business wear, from glasses, to jacket pockets, ties and more

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.