Research in Architecture and Design

On this page:

Design research
Communities of Practice and Project Based Research
Current poles of interest – Advanced Technologies, The Expanded Field, Urban Environments
Information and resources

Design Research

The School of Architecture and Design at RMIT is widely recognised for innovative leadership and contribution to excellence in Design Research. At RMIT we contend thatresearch can be, and is, conducted through designing and that the process of designing, as a means of increasing knowledge, parallels research in other areas in interesting ways. There exists a designerly way of thinking and communicating that is both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems.

Communities of Practice and Project Based Research

There is an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which design and other practitioners bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict.

At RMIT we regard reflective practice and the formation of communities of practice as integral to design research. We support and engage our students in communities of practice which assert that learning is fundamentally a social phenomenon; where knowledge is integrated in the life of these communities which share interests, ideas, discourses, and ways of doing things. Design Research knowledge is integrated in the doing, social relations, and expertise of these communities. The processes of learning and membership in these communities of practice are inseparable. Knowledge is inseparable from practice. It is not possible to know without doing.

The School's research activities take place within, as well as across, discipline areas of architecture, fashion, interior design, industrial design and landscape architecture as well as across disciplines involving candidates from many other fields including graphic design, engineering, computer science and music. Specialist facilities and resources include Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, Sound Studio, Furniture Laboratory, Urban Architecture Laboratory, Invited Practice Stream, and the RMIT Design Archives. Postgraduate studies undertaken in the School cover wide areas of design including products, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, installation art, curatorial practice, communication, interiors, fashion, auralisation, spatiality and sustainable systems.

Postgraduate research projects:

Architecture (opens in new window)

Industrial Design

Interior Design (opens in new window)

Current Poles of Interest

Research into intellectual change is revealing that the learning and research environments that support innovation most effectively are characterised by a dynamic that stems from participants being engaged with three differing perspectives on a domain of endeavour. The most enduring description of such differences contrasts those practitioners within a domain who focus on form and structure, those who focus on utility and societal impact, and those who concentrate on delight. These polarities are interpreted differently from domain to domain, and at different times within domains. The reason for the success of tri-polar environments is that participants can adhere to and refine their positions in the light of different positions, but without the threat of being characterised as a polar opposite to a single powerful or prevailing view.

RMIT Architecture and Design consolidates its research activities around a series of distinct but interrelated research streams, forming curatorial communities of academics, students and research partners located across adjacent disciplines and outside the academy within practice and industry. For certain academic staff one or more of these thematic research clusters provide a primary focus for their research activities and academic leadership. Participation in these research areas by RMIT Architecture and Design academics generally remains fluid and dynamic, with strategic clusters of research staff and linkage partners forming around specific projects and events.

Currently our scholarly ambition is to sustain three contested areas of endeavour across the school. We believe that holding multiple, articulated positions leads to a productive scholarship and research environment. We understand these poles as points of intensity within a dynamic constellational structure rather than as fixed points. These three poles provide a critical framework and help us to form communities of practice through which we actively curate the careers of our alumni and other exemplar practitioners. The poles are not exclusive. The poles interact and overlap and are always in question. Over time they are challenged and change. Currently we have three poles which include Advanced Technologies, the Expanded Field, and Urban Environments.

Advanced Technologies

Advanced Technologies deals with the pursuit of rule generated processes in design that allow for the utilisation of new digital and biological technologies.

Rather than understanding design activity as finding the solution to problems deriving from an analysis, or a nuanced set of moves stemming from a mastery of canonical knowledge, advanced technological works are understood as proceeding from a notion of emergent relationships within an expanded design domain. A design domain can be thought of as coherently related ecologies of knowledge, materials, techniques, actions and circumstances from which advanced technologies is instanced. Informatics, local relations, contemporary modes of production, sensibilities and activities become constituent of the incipient domain from which design emerges.

Technique is a key term in the structuring of a design domain, as it allows instances of a particular domain to become manifest. Techniques may be analogue processes or digital methods. An interest in digital methods recognises architecture itself as an operative complex of physical and informational relationships.

The RMIT Advanced Technologies works closely with the RMIT Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory and the Design Research Institute Customising Space program.

The Expanded Field

The Expanded Field research projects (opens in new window)

The Expanded Field deals with issues of ethics and sustainability, regimes of care, art and public space, social needs and the ephemeral. ‘The Expanded Field: Interdisciplinary Practice’ incorporates project-based design research across disciplines.

Instead of focussing upon the differences between the disciplines, it capitalises on the common ground: the design methods, the scales and nature of engagement, the sites for action, and the methods of production and dissemination of the research. The project is inclusive rather than exclusive. An interdisciplinary practice can identify the gaps that conventional practice has marginalised – as fertile opportunities for intervention.

Broad areas of research include art and public space; ephemeral architectures; social, political and economic infrastructures; and a lateral approach towards social and environmental sustainability and urbanism. It pays homage to Rosalind Kraus’s matrix of sculpture, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and landscape architecture in her seminal essay, ’Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, but instead of reaffirming the distinctions between these disciplines, it is more interested in the spaces in-between. It chooses to operate at the edges and have identified these margins as places of becoming, transaction, negotiation, and improvisation. It privileges the question (what if?) over the solution, and the process over the product.

The RMIT Expanded Field works closely with the Design Research Institute Urban Liveability Program and the Design Research Institute Geoplaced Knowledges Program.

Urban Environments

Urban Environments has as its focus a concern for precedent, type, and the pragmatics of infrastructure and the urban scale, including civic consciousness and hence civic narratives.

The Urban Environments area is devoted to a direct engagement with contemporary urbanism. Urban Environments research involves an ongoing inquiry into the diversity of forces that shape the contemporary metropolis with a particular emphasis on Melbourne as a case study. How we think about urban form and the form of urban regions is being challenged by a growing awareness of the need to engage in adaptive change to deal with the consequences of climate change and population growth. It is increasingly evident that emphasising a single urban form may not be appropriate to meeting these challenges. We need both a plurality of approaches and a plurality of scales of engagement in order to present society with future design scenarios which respond to the effects of environmental and social change on urban and landscape forms.

Consider contemporary definitions of urbanism which are extended by increasingly complex networks. For example, air space and cyberspace have reshaped our cities, as cheap air travel and electronic communication have facilitated even more extensive dispersals and regroupings of urban culture. This research group explores across the urban field where there maybe no particular sense of place; geography becomes personalised, made up of accumulated, idiosyncratic according to the activities, connections and movements of individuals and sub-groups. It examines contemporary urban ways of life and urban values which are highly mobile, both culturally and physically, and has allowed a transformation of settlement.

The RMIT Urban Environment works closely with the Design Research Institute Urban Liveability Program and the Design Research Institute Geoplace Knowledges Program.