Competition: fbesoc logo/visual identity design competition

Brief: fbesoc needs a new visual identity that reflects our aims/objectives and the growing BE student community we're putting together. Established in August 2011 by a group of enthusiastic Built Environment students, fbesoc is a brand new student society looking to build a more active, creative and social student community within the faculty. In 2012 we're going to be running more social events (including a stall at oweek, start of session party, fbesoc cruise) and academic events/initiatives (like student skill tutorials, dwiki, FBEAnnual); as well as creating a new student publication.

Our community is made up of students studying architecture, interior, landscape, architectural computing, industrial design, planning, construction management as well as students from the BE postgraduate degrees. The society aims to engage this community by encouraging  networking/collaboration among students and establish an open forum that focuses on breaking down the barriers that exist between the various BE degrees. We want to students to be able to freely discuss design issues/topics, share ideas /knowledge and interaction socially/creatively with students from across the faculty. 

A new visual identity that reflects the fbesoc community is required for the society to be successful & we want You to design it for us! If you are a designer currently studying at UNSW (you don't have to be a BE student) then we want to ask you very politely to develop a new logo/visual identity for our society/community. It needs to be engaging, identifiable as well as appealing to all students from across the BE. Our members/community should be able to identify with this logo/visual identity.

Requirements: 

• Entrants must be current UNSW students (dont have to be a student of the BE) (Required)
• A logo that includes the text "fbesoc" (include colour & B/W as well as examples of how the logo works at various sizes) (Required)
• The logo may be part of an overall fbesoc visual identity (Optional),
• A template design for the blogger blog and logo design for the dwiki may also be included (Optional)

Submission: 

• The logo is to be submitted as a high resolution .png and 300dpi photoshop and/or adobe illustrator file.
• All other submitted designs/files should be included in a single .pdf file.
• All valid entries will be posted on the fbesoc blog & facebook page under the entrants name.
• Winning logo will be decided by the fbesoc executive and will become the property of the Faculty of the Built Environment Society (for copyright/freedom of use purposes).
• Submission: using your zmail (@student.unsw.edu.au) email address, email your final design to contact@fbesoc.com under the title "fbesoc Logo Competition"

Deadline: 31st January 2012

Prize: Fame & recognition for designing the new community logo/visual identity! 

Exhibition: aMaze, USYD architecture graduation exhibition

Now we move on from our own Faculty's graduation exhibitions to those of the other design/architecture/planning/construction schools in Sydney, starting with the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney (UTS INDEX2011 will be next). Titled aMaze, the faculty-wide graduation exhibition brings together student projects from various undergraduate & postgraduate studios, including the architecture masters graduation and third year architecture programs. I didn't have the opportunity to visit the exhibition on opening night and tried my best to make sense of the exhibition the following day, with much difficulty to say the least. The exhibition itself was scattered throughout the architecture faculty building with very few directional signs, alluding to the 'Maze' theme of the exhibition which was further establish through the partial creation of maze like corridors using props and white plastic. Although I am sure this setup seemed like a good idea on the night I was slightly taken aback by the potential environmental implications of such a design decision in a exhibition that is showcasing the next generation of architects and what this said about the value the architecture school placed on sustainable design. When I visited the exhibition the day after the opening night, the white plastic screens were torn apart in some places and the connection between the 'aMaze' maze and the rubbish tip didn't seem all that distant from the bad design practices of the past. Unless of course this white plastic was in fact biodegradable and no one had told me, in which case the exhibition should have put up a sigh to that effect. This was another problem with the exhibition, there were very few posters actually explaining the the briefs and the projects being displayed. Overall the whole aMaze theme seemed like code for bad communication in an exhibition that simply didn't want to let me know what was going on.

This left me struggling to understand whether I was looking at a first year architecture studio project or a third year graduation project. It was equally difficult to make sense of what degree/major was on display and what themes and ideas a project was dealing with. It seemed strange to me to separate a model from its accompanying poster and a poster from its accompanying folio, particularly when you consider that one of the fundamental skills a graduating architecture student requires is an ability to clearly communicate an idea. But this was just the setup in the biggest room of the exhibition and what it did was create a lot of unnecessary noise. It was incredibly difficult to consume an idea/scheme when one was posed with the challenge of finding a folio and then a poster of the same scheme; the models might have as well been completely absent (I'm not even sure if they belonged to the same year as the third year posters). Overwhelmed by this overcomplex task I started comparing the technical skills of our USYD colleagues and it seems they place a much greater value on graphic presentation, all the posters and accompanying folios (yes it looks like they needed to have multipage folio books) were very well designed/composed, though by themselves they did little to full communicate the complexity of most the schemes. Physical models seemed to have been considered of lesser importance at USYD than UNSW and many of the models weren't incredibly engaging, despite being beautifully constructed (almost all of the time). The modelled schemes came across as being oversimplified past the point of a meaningful communication of an idea into an idealised situation that would never be replicated in reality. The accompanying exhibition publication perhaps alludes to the reason for this as an attempt "to pare back formal complexity to find something essential and articulate" by the students /staff. 

Interestingly enough, the value of what we are being taught at the Built Environment seemed to have been justified by this graduation exhibition at USYD. The varied approach to the communication of an idea/scheme, the value of taking a humanist approach to design and of course the value of environmental sustainability in design all seemed to have a stronger presence in the UNSW M.Arch & B.ArchStudies graduation exhibition than was revealed at USYD's aMaze.

The exhibition is on until Friday 9th December, more details here.

Student Opportunity: Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships

The Scholarships are awarded annually to candidates who show great promise in the arts and literature, with nine scholarship categories available, offered over alternate years:

• Acting
• Architecture
• Ballet
• Instrumental music
• Painting
• Poetry
• Prose
• Sculpture
• Singing.

Scholarship funds can be used to assist with study programs, professional training courses and/or mentor programs.

2012 Scholarships

The categories for 2012 scholarships include architecture, ballet, instrumental music, poetry and prose.

Are you eligible?

To be eligible for this award, you must be a native-born Australian aged 21-35 (17-35 for ballet) at the closing date of entries.

The scholarship’s value

Scholarships each worth $20,000, payable over two years with funds paid in quarterly instalments of $2,500. The total pool of money is $100,000.

For more information, click here

COFA Annual 2011

Congratulations to our graduating compadres over at COFA! 

This year the COFA Annual was held at the Roundhouse/Squarehouse on campus (which is a seriously smaller venue than CarriageWorks where the Annual was held last year) and boy did the COFA kids put on a show! Cramming every single space with either an artwork, design project or a media presentation. There was plenty of good ideas, technical skills & engaging presentations on show which really highlighted some of the differences between COFA & the FBE. 

The most striking of these being the value placed by COFA graduates on presentations that engage the viewer, asking them to interact, touch, feel, understand through experience. When compared to the FBE graduation exhibition also visited in recent weeks (M.Arch, B.ArchStudies & B.ArchComp) the COFA Annual was a completely different experience. At the FBE we seem to care less about the communication of an idea and focus more on the idea itself and although this can be see as a positive, it is also a negative when an idea is hard to explain (or when the idea just isn't that good in the first place). At both the Masters of Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture Studies graduation exhibition the projects were generally presented in quite an un-engaging (some would say dull) banner/poster + model format and although this worked well for some the majority were let down by their poor graphic design/presentation skills. While the presentations at the COFA Annual were carefully considered, being designed to be viewed/digested quickly and understood in the exhibition environment. 

Another interesting difference (or similarity?) between COFA & the FBE was the Environments projects which most closely sailed to what we do at the FBE. These project seemed to focus exclusively on a spatial experience. I was a bit confused to say the least about what these projects were actually about and found myself critiquing them architecturally but then being puzzled by whether they were intended to be architecture in the first place. It was interesting viewing these and seeing how the user was treated/valued through the presence of human figures in all the Environments projects, an element that was mostly missing from the architecture grad projects.  

The COFA Annual reflected the varied approach to design taken by our sister design faculty, an approach that seemed to ask students to consider the user(s) response throughout their project, from the original conceptualisation of an idea to the final presentation (a humanist approach to design?). 

See more graduation projects at the COFA Annual website.

Also, read the tharunka review here. 

Environments

Environments

Environments 

Environments

Environments 

]Sustainability

Sustainability

Sustainability

Environments

Environments