Project A and B Overview

In the final year of the Master of Landscape Architecture, you are given the opportunity to develop and explore your own practice trajectory through an independently generated, rigorous and sustained design research enquiry. This enquiry, undertaken across a full year, is referred to as ‘a Design Research Project.’

Design Research Projects are undertaken as a means of exploring, critiquing and expanding landscape architectural design, practice and research. In this course, students will be presented with the opportunity to adapt, develop, and evolve novel ways of approaching design through research and research through design. Design Research Projects are experimental, rigorous, ideas-led, innovative and generative, necessitating critical engagement with the expanded roles and responsibilities landscape architects might have in local and global contexts. The design research projects developed in the final year of the Master of Landscape Architecture at RMIT equip students with the capacity and expertise to be an advocate and agent of change, actively advancing the discipline and profession of landscape architecture to meet the unique contemporary and future challenges and opportunities.

In this significant capstone course of the MLA program, students will synthesise the agencies that were developed throughout the program. Students will develop skills to articulate, position and develop strategic individual design approaches to prepare for their entry into the profession, as practitioners, researchers and academics.

Project A Overview

The Design Research Project A establishes a rigorous, yet highly experimental design research approach, that includes form production, analysis, prototyping, simulation, observation, construction, to define, adapt, develop and gradually evolve an individual design research enquiry. Students will develop, evolve and situate their practice trajectory and related design research project within the domain of Landscape Architecture. Students will have to opportunity to work in a Design Research Unit with a distinct supervisor focus.

Within the Design Research Unit, students will be exposed to a specific design research methodology and a range of advanced methods, techniques and approaches that will enable the development of a sophisticated, comprehensive and critical Design Research Project.