Learning Landscapes 2.0: Adaptable educational environments

This project has blended two streams of enquiry: temporary and transportable construction technology, and flexible blended-learning environments. It seeks to develop prototypes for a series of environments suited for the activities of learning (future-proofed schools), as practiced in the twenty first century. The research utilises techniques of: historic survey, case study, first-hand observation, and architectural design (as research). The design comprises three major components: The determinate landscape: in-situ concrete ‘plate’ that is permanent. The indeterminate landscape: a kit of pre-fabricated 2-D panels assembled in a unique manner at each site to suit the client and context; manufactured to the principles of design-for-disassembly. The stations: pre-fabricated packages of highly-serviced space connected through the determinate landscape. This project was submitted to the ‘Future Proofing Schools’ competition (professional category) in October 2011. The competition was part of a research project supported under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Grant funding scheme (project LP0991146).

Brisbane Airport Atelier : Team Delta

This architectural and urban design project was conducted as part of the Brisbane Airport Corporations master-planning Atelier, run in conjunction with City Lab. This creation and innovation event brought together approximately 80 designers, associated professionals, and both local and state government representatives to research concepts for future development and planning of the Brisbane airport site. The Team Delta research project explored the development of a new precinct cluster around the existing international terminal building; with a view of reinforcing the sense of place and arrival. The development zone explores the options of developing a subtropical character through landscape elements such as open plazas, tourist attractions, links to existing adjacent waterways, and localised rapid transport options. The proposal tests the possibilities of developing a cultural hub in conjunction with transport infrastructure and the airport terminal(s).

Chaos and creativity of play : designing emotional engagement in public spaces

How do we create strong urban narratives? How do we create affection for our cities? Play, an essential part of any species' biological existence and development, can often be perceived as chaotic and derogatory to social and spatial order. Play is also often perceived as a creative force which generates social and spatial value. This paper looks at the design approaches to both chaotic and creative perceptions of publics at play in urban space. Commonly, Urban and Architectural Design constitutes reactive management of perceived chaos, which derogatorily effects our sensory and emotional engagement with space. Alternatively, Urban and Architectural Design can appeal to the creativity of play, by encouraging unsolicited novelty that is vital to strong experiential narratives in the city and iterating environments that encourage the emergence of physical, emotional and cultural invention. These perceptions of chaos and creativity affect the design methodology of professional practice. Tested through the exciting vehicle of Parkour as urban narrative, the constraints and opportunities of both approaches are presented.

Portfolio review

The portfolio can be loosely defined as a collection or collation of achievements, artefacts, creative works or examples of competencies, usually for the purpose of demonstrating a person’s capabilities in a specific field of endeavour. People make and share their portfolios for many reasons: social or cultural recognition, employment, accreditation, and educational qualification. It is this latter purpose that this chapter addresses; the creation and use of a portfolio for educational development and certification.

Making mangoes move

A landscape of mangoes most likely brings to mind a place in a tropical location. By the end of the nineteenth century that place could have been located on any continent in the world. Mangoes were found in geographic locations; in scientific institutions; as crop plants; and as a backyard trees. Here I trace the movement of mangoes Mangifera indica Linn., focusing on the transnational links formed through colonial botanic gardens in Australia. Botanic gardens were largely understood through their work in establishing economically successful plantation crops, such as sugar and tea. Mangoes were not a success crop of the age of botanic imperialism. Instead, mangoes were simply one species among the millions of plants that botanic gardens moved in addition to these well known commercial crops. Colonial science moved plants for a myriad of other types of reasons, for ornament, for curiosity, for lesser commercial purposes and for pure science. In each site the mango emerged, the discourses and technologies that traveled with it changed according to local needs. Indeed, rather than finding mangoes located in one place, tracing their movement demonstrates that this was an extended landscape connecting these things across time and space...

goDesign Express 2011 Workshop

The goDesign Express 2011 Workshop was a design immersion workshop run by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Built Environment and Engineering Faculty during three weeks of 70-minute art class periods/sessions in August/September 2011 at Morayfield State High School, for 80 Grade 10 and 64 Grade 11 art students and two teachers, and October 2011 at Narangba Valley State High School for 60 Grade 10 and 30 Grade 11 art students and two teachers. Funded and administrated through QUT’s Widening Participation Program, which supports outreach activities to increase tertiary enrolments for under represented groups (such as low-SES, rural and indigenous students), the program utilised two activities from Day 1 of the highly successful 3-day goDesign Travelling Workshop Program for Regional Secondary Students (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/47747/). In contrast to this program, which was facilitated by two tertiary design educators, the goDesign Express 2011 Workshop was facilitated primarily by three tertiary interior design/architecture students, with assistance from a design educator. This action research study aimed to facilitate an awareness in young people, of the value of design thinking skills in generating strategies to solve local community challenges. It also aimed to investigate the value of collaboration between secondary school students and teachers, and tertiary design students and educators, in inspiring post-secondary pathways for school students, professional development for schoolteachers, and alternative career prospects and leadership skills for tertiary design students. During the workshop, secondary students and teachers explored, analysed and reimagined their local community through a series of scaffolded problem solving activities around the theme of ‘place’. Students worked individually and in groups designing graphics, fashion and products, and utilising sketching, making, communication, collaboration and presentation skills to improve their design process, while considering social, cultural and environmental opportunities for their local community. The workshop was mentioned in a news article in the local Caboolture Shire Herald newspaper.

We can build homes to survive bushfires, so why don’t we?

Published opinion piece in online media 'The Conversation' discussing the reasons for the low uptake of bushfire resilient housing in Australia.

Lost in space: The place of the architectural milieu in the aetiology and treatment of schizophrenia

Purpose – Psychological and epidemiological literature suggests that the built environment plays both causal and therapeutic roles in schizophrenia, but what are the implications for designers? The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role the built environment plays in psycho‐environmental dynamics, in order that negative effects can be avoided and beneficial effects emphasised in architectural design. Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken is a translational exploration of the dynamics between the built environment and psychotic illness, using primary research from disciplines as diverse as epidemiology, neurology and psychology. Findings – The built environment is conceived as being both an agonist and as an antagonist for the underlying processes that present as psychosis. The built environment is implicated through several means, through the opportunities it provides. These may be physical, narrative, emotional, hedonic or personal. Some opportunities may be negative, and others positive. The built environment is also an important source of unexpected aesthetic stimulation, yet in psychotic illnesses, aesthetic sensibilities characteristically suffer from deterioration. Research limitations/implications – The findings presented are based on research that is largely translated from very different fields of enquiry. Whilst findings are cogent and logical, much of the support is correlational rather than empirical. Social implications – The WHO claims that schizophrenia destroys 24 million lives worldwide, with an exponential effect on human and financial capital. Because evidence implicates the built environment, architectural and urban designers may have a role to play in reducing the human costs wrought by the illness. Originality/value – Never before has architecture been so explicitly implicated as a cause of mental illness. This paper was presented to the Symposium of Mental Health Facility Design, and is essential reading for anyone involved in designing for improved mental health.

Communication Architecture Design for Real-Time Networked Control Systems

Networked control over data networks has received increasing attention in recent years. Among many problems in networked control systems (NCSs) is the need to reduce control latency and jitter and to deal with packet dropouts. This paper introduces our recent progress on a queuing communication architecture for real-time NCS applications, and simple strategies for dealing with packet dropouts. Case studies for a middle-scale process or multiple small-scale processes are presented for TCP/IP based real-time NCSs. Variations of network architecture design are modelled, simulated, and analysed for evaluation of control latency and jitter performance. It is shown that a simple bandwidth upgrade or adding hierarchy does not necessarily bring benefits for performance improvement of control latency and jitter. A co-design of network and control is necessary to maximise the real-time control performance of NCSs

Complex modelling of open system design for sustainable architecture

This paper argues a model of complex system design for sustainable architecture within a framework of entropy evolution. The spectrum of sustainable architecture consists of the efficient use of energy and material resource in life-cycle of buildings, the active involvement of the occupants in micro-climate control within buildings, and the natural environmental context. The interactions of the parameters compose a complex system of sustainable architectural design, of which the conventional linear and fragmented design technologies are insufficient to indicate holistic and ongoing environmental performance. The complexity theory of dissipative structure states a microscopic formulation of open system evolution, which provides a system design framework for the evolution of building environmental performance towards an optimization of sustainability in architecture.

Rhetoric of landscape architecture and interior design discourses : preparation for cross-disciplinary practice

The rhetoric of the pedagogic discourses of landscape architectural students and interior design students is described as part of a doctoral study undertaken to document practices and orientations prior to cross-disciplinary collaboration. We draw on the theoretical framework of Basil Bernstein, an educational sociologist, and the rhetorical method of Kenneth Burke, a literary dramatist, to study the grammars of ‘landscape’ representation employed within these disciplinary examples. We investigate how prepared final year students are for working in a cross-disciplinary manner. The discursive interactions of their work, as illustrated by four examples of drawn images and written text, are described. Our findings suggest that we need to concern ourselves aspects of our pedagogic discourse that brings uniqueness and value to our disciplines ,as well as that shared discourses between disciplines.

Adaptive modelling of sustainable architecture design in entropy evolutionary

This paper argues a model of adaptive design for sustainable architecture within a framework of entropy evolution. The spectrum of sustainable architecture consists of efficient use of energy and material resource in the life-cycle of buildings, active involvement of the occupants into micro-climate control within the building, and the natural environment as the physical context. The interactions amongst all the parameters compose a complex system of sustainable architecture design, of which the conventional linear and fragmented design technologies are insufficient to indicate holistic and ongoing environmental performance. The latest interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics states a microscopic formulation of an entropy evolution of complex open systems. It provides a design framework for an adaptive system evolves for the optimization in open systems, this adaptive system evolves for the optimization of building environmental performance. The paper concludes that adaptive modelling in entropy evolution is a design alternative for sustainable architecture.

Crossing boundaries to explore sustainable architecture by open system design

This paper argues a model of open system design for sustainable architecture, based on a thermodynamics framework of entropy as an evolutionary paradigm. The framework can be simplified to stating that an open system evolves in a non-linear pattern from a far-from-equilibrium state towards a non-equilibrium state of entropy balance, which is a highly ordered organization of the system when order comes out of chaos. This paper is work in progress on a PhD research project which aims to propose building information modelling for optimization and adaptation of buildings environmental performance as an alternative sustainable design program in architecture. It will be used for efficient distribution and consumption of energy and material resource in life-cycle buildings, with the active involvement of the end-users and the physical constraints of the natural environment.

Proceedings of the Interior Space in Other Places : An IDEA [Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association] Symposium [Edited Volume of Proceedings]

Conference curatorial outline The focus of this symposium was to question whether interior design is changing relative to local conditions, and the effect globalization has on the performance of regional, particularly Southern hemisphere identities. The intention being to understand how theory and practice is transposed to ‘distant lands’, and how ideas shift from one place to another. To this extent the symposium invited papers on the export, translation and adoption of theories and practices of interior design to differing climates, cultures, and landscapes. This process, sometimes referred to as a shift from ‘the centre to the margins’, seeks new perspectives on the adoption of European and US design ideas abroad, as well as their return to their place of origin. Papers were invited from a range of perspectives including the export of ideas/attitudes to interior spaces, history of interior spaces abroad, and the adoption of ideas/processes to new conditions. Paralleling this trafficking of ideas are broader observations about interior space that emerge through specificity of place. These include new and emerging directions and differences in our understanding of interiority; both real and virtual, and an ever-changing relationship to city, suburb and country. Keeping within the Symposium theme the intention was to examine other places, particularly on the margins of the discipline’s domain. Semantic slippage aside, there are a range of approaches that engage outside events and practices enabling a transdisciplinary practice that draws from other philosophical and theoretical frameworks. Moreover as the field expands and new territories are opened up, the virtual worlds of computer gaming, animations, and interactive environments, both rely on and produce new forms of expression. This raises questions about the extent such spaces adopt or translate existing theory and practice, that is the transposition from one area to another and their return to the discipline.

Design and modeling of collaboration architecture for security

Threats against computer networks evolve very fast and require more and more complex measures. We argue that teams respectively groups with a common purpose for intrusion detection and prevention improve the measures against rapid propagating attacks similar to the concept of teams solving complex tasks known from field of work sociology. Collaboration in this sense is not easy task especially for heterarchical environments. We propose CIMD (collaborative intrusion and malware detection) as a security overlay framework to enable cooperative intrusion detection approaches. Objectives and associated interests are used to create detection groups for exchange of security-related data. In this work, we contribute a tree-oriented data model for device representation in the scope of security. We introduce an algorithm for the formation of detection groups, show realization strategies for the system and conduct vulnerability analysis. We evaluate the benefit of CIMD by simulation and probabilistic analysis.