About Li Ping Thong

Li Ping Thong 汤丽萍 | Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Digital Design) | School of Design
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

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At a Glance

• Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Digital Design at RMIT University
• Leads the School of Design’s largest discipline area across Games, Animation, Digital Media and MAGI.
• 20+ years teaching, curriculum and academic leadership experience across Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia
• $1.2M+ research income across government, industry, education and community-partnered projects
• Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage project Young Creators Lab: Gaming the Curriculum
• Public speaker and media commentator on digital design, UX, emerging technologies, education and social impact

Associate Professor Li Ping Thong is Associate Dean of Digital Design at RMIT University’s School of Design in Melbourne, Australia. She leads the School’s largest discipline area across Games, Animation, Digital Media and the Master of Animation, Games and Interactivity.

With more than 20 years of international teaching, curriculum and academic leadership experience across Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia, Li Ping is a digital design educator, researcher and academic leader working across digital media, curriculum innovation, emerging technologies and practice-led digital education.

Her work sits at the intersection of digital design, emerging technologies, education, sustainability and community impact. Her research and practice span user experience design, user interface design, interaction design, immersive media, serious games, digital storytelling, web and app development, and creative digital content production. Across these areas, she is interested in how digital systems shape behaviour, participation, learning, culture and the conditions of everyday life.

Since 2017, Li Ping has secured and contributed to more than $1.2 million in research income across interdisciplinary projects with government, industry, education and community partners. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage project Young Creators Lab: Gaming the Curriculum, a national research collaboration exploring how game-based learning can support young people’s creativity, digital capability, student-led learning and wellbeing.

Her broader research portfolio includes projects across road safety, food waste, sustainability, cultural heritage, digital inclusion, education and community engagement. She has worked with partners including the Australian Automobile Association, End Food Waste Australia, Foodbank Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne Girls Grammar School and Golden Plains Shire Council.

Li Ping is also an active public speaker and media commentator on digital design, emerging technologies, user experience, immersive media, digital inclusion, education and the social impact of design. She has contributed to public conversations through national television, radio and podcast interviews, including ABC News and ABC Radio, and has delivered keynotes, public talks and invited presentations on the future of design, digital media education, place-based practice, and learning and teaching in a changing technological landscape.

As a CALD leader in design and technology, Li Ping brings a perspective shaped by lived experience, regional engagement and long-term cross-cultural work across Southeast Asia and Australia. Her leadership is grounded in clarity, strategic thinking and the creation of collaborative environments where new ideas, practices and partnerships in digital design can take shape.

Outside her academic role, Li Ping stewards a 32-acre rural property in regional Victoria. This hands-on, analogue and land-based practice increasingly informs how she thinks about digital design, education and leadership. The duality of city and land, code and soil, digital systems and living systems shapes her current land-based digital practice.

Her emerging Farm Lab practice uses the rural property as a methodological setting for examining physical-digital convergence, environmental interaction, more-than-human design and regenerative systems. Through this work, she explores how digital media design might move beyond extractive models of technological development toward more situated, relational and ecologically responsive forms of practice.

Li Ping is open to connecting with industry collaborators, educators, researchers, digital media professionals, designers and community partners working across VR, AR, UX, serious games, digital storytelling, immersive media, learning technologies, sustainability and regenerative systems.

Current Areas of Focus:

• User experience, interface design and interaction design
• Emerging and immersive technologies, including VR, AR, XR and spatial computing
• Serious games, simulation and game-based learning
• Digital storytelling, digital heritage and place-based media
• Digital design pedagogy, curriculum innovation and academic leadership
• Food systems, sustainability and digital social impact
• More-than-human design, environmental interaction and land-based digital practice