Since last year, I have been collaborating with some architects, textile designers and mechatronics engineers in RMIT to explore the nexus between robotics and kinetic architecture, responsive surface and skin, personal and public urban space.
An early fruit of this collaboration is the RMIT Learning and Teaching Investment Fund that we just recently won. The grant will be used to conduct a new multidisciplinary studio in RMIT Melbourne, Australia.
Augmented Spatiality: Retrofitting the Social City is the new design studio that will run in Semester 2, 2011. This will based on the past RAD-P elective that we run last year, but it will be more ambitious, designerly focused, with great design and technical support from PhD candidates in RMIT, who are doing research in various topics including kinetic architecture, elastic transformable skins, vision-based systems, mechatronics, new materials in architecture, and algorithmic design for parametric modelling.
We invite students from different programs, architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, industrial design, public arts, and textile design, to join the class. They will work in groups, drawing inspirations from utopian-future city ideas of the past (e.g. Smithsonian’s House of the Future, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, etc) towards the design and a prototypical model of an urban intervention on a street or site in Melbourne.
It will be an intensive 9-weeks studio starting in a week time! I can’t wait!
