Designing the Dynamic

Blog entry by: Dominik Holzer

AEC Connect has been strongly involved in a 5 day event titled Designing the

Dynamic’ this November at RMIT University in Melbourne. Hosted by RMIT’s Design Research Institute (DRI) and the Spatial Information Architecture Lab (SIAL), Dominik was part of the organising committee and Andre presented via Video link from overseas on the opening day of this 4 day workshop plus one day symposium.

Andre’s thoughts have been posted on the event website and they can be viewed here:

Dominik’s impressions are summarised below:

I’ve had several discussions with Mark and Jane (Burry) over the past months about hosting a SmartGeometry style event in Melbourne and it was no coincidence that we were very quick in agreeing on the ‘Designing the Dynamic’ topic once we had confirmation by Hugh Whitehead from Fosters (and one of the SmartGeometry directors) to join us in Melbourne for the occasion. Based on Hugh’s first thoughts, dynamic systems, and in particular the reference of sailing became centre-stage in conceptualising the programme for the workshop and the symposium. Hugh’s intellectual input and enthusiasm was a great motivation for us to go against the flow and set up this event that defies professional boundaries and avoids preconceived ways of collaboration as they so often occur in practice.

The concept of staying open-minded and focusing on experimentation – both physical and digital - paid off during the four day workshop where four groups were formed:

Trade Offs

Absolute Speed

Material Behaviour, and

City Dynamics

The vibrant dynamic at the workshop venue greatly affected all four groups.  With highly speculative work comes a high risk of failure and it was the failure that was essential in order to quickly learn from it and move on. After a series of highly inspiring presentations on the start of the first day, the evenings of the days to follow were used for further talks by key innovators as well as design mavericks of the local scene. Dominik gave a provocative spiel on  ‘A Requiem for Computational Design Tools’ in order to stir up discussions about the relationship between the digital tool maker and the user of digital tools. And discuss we did.

The speculative outcomes of the workshop were followed by equally speculative as well as informative presentations during the symposium. The presentations covered a wide spectrum from High-speed sailing, Wind-Tunnel testing, Mathematics in Architecture, Dynamics in Construction and many more. 

For a comprehensive overview about the event (including texts, images and videos), please go to the organisers website:

http://designingthedynamic.com/