Competition: Electrolux Design Lab

It's often easy for architects to think their the centre of the universe in our faculty and forget about everyone else. Well here's a competition that architects can't enter - it's only for the Industrial design students out there!

The Electorlux Design Lad is an annual global design competition open to undergraduates and recent graduates of Industrial Design students. The 2012 competition theme is 'Design Experience', students are invited to present innovative idea for household appliances that explore the experience of cooking. Students are encouraged to draw inspiration from experience creators (chefs, architects, interior architects, etc.) to design home appliances that provide a fuller sensory experience. Keeping with the heritage of Electrolux, entries should reflect Scandinavian Design values - being sensitive to the environment, providing intuitive ease of use and aesthetic appeal.

Links: http://www.electroluxdesignlab.com/

Deadline: 1st, June 2012

Executives 2012

Though the new Executive have been elected for a while, the blog has now been updated with their details.
Here's the list.

2012 - Current Executive
Co-President - Nick Adamson (B of Planning)
Co-President - Alex Galego (B of Architecture Studies) 
Treasurer - Sebastian Reid (B of Construction Management)
Secretary - Nadia Hendryani (B of Architecture Studies)
Creative Student Led Projects Coordinator- Christine Ng (B of Architecture Studies)
Arc Delegate - Kathryn George (B of Architecture Studies)
Editor and Communications Director - Patrick Leal (B of Architecture Studies)
Education Director - Jae Ward (B of Architectural Computing)
Social Director - Steph Griffiths (B of Architecture Studies)

Congratulations!

3D Video Mapping Opportunity

Arts week is coming up soon, and there will be a '3D video mapping' project happening during the week. If you are not acquainted with the process, here's a video:



And if you would like to get involved, register your interest on the FBEsoc Facebook page.

Fbesoc AGM this Friday!

This is a heads up that on 5PM Friday of Week 7 Fbesoc will be holding an Annual General Meeting (AGM) to keep our little society growing!

We've come a long way since our first AGM last August; we've managed toestablished a thriving faculty wide community, made it easier to make friends from across the faculty, run our first social events, supported the other growing societies in our faculty, established the first fbe student led project (creative community & spaces project), created an active student led blog, had a massive Oweek and met a whole bunch of excellent Built Environment kids along the way!

The week 7 AGM will be a way to build on this success and move forward. It will let us keep the society relevant by getting new members involved in running and organising of the society.

The following Executive positions are up for election:

• 2x Co-Presidents
• 1x Secretary
• 1x Treasurer 
• 1x Arc Delegate
• 1x Academic Coordinator 
• 1x Creative Student Led Projects Coordinator 
• 1x Social Events Coordinator 
• 1x Editor & Communications Coordinator 

Everyone is encouraged to get involved and go for a position if they're interested!

There will also be a few changes to the constitution which will make it easier for everyone to contribute to the society/community. These changes will be made available closer to the AGM, please stay tuned to our facebook page and group! 

Fbesoc AGM Event Details

Where: Room TBA (please check event page and posters in foyer closer to event), Faculty of the Built Environment, Red Centre, West Wing, UNSW

When: 5pm Friday (Week 7), 20th April, 2012

Event: http://www.facebook.com/events/160408284082037/ 

Student Opportunity: Internships at AR-MA

AR-MA have an immediate need for the following positions:

Requirements:

• Strong graphic and design talent
• Strong 3D modeling skills in Maya and Rhino
• Strong rendering skills
• Excellent command of Adobe Creative Suite
• Excellent craft and model-making skills
• Training will be provided for Rhino python scripting and grasshopper.

Successful candidates will receive a monthly stipend.

To apply, please email cover letter, CV, and portfolio.

http://ar-ma.net/employment

employment@ar-ma.net

Via UTS Architecture

Competition: Redesign our community coverphoto!

Here's a little design competition to get you through the 2 week mid-sem break! Re-design/re-imagine/re-vision/re-create our Fbesoc community facebook coverphoto into something that reflects our growing design community.

Share your design on the Fbe Society Group (to this album) & have it be the group/page banner.

Use whatever creative medium you want (photography, graphic design, painting, model building, drawing, etc.) and the Fbesoc Logo (which you can also re-design/re-imagine as you please) to make something new, creative and awesome.

Dimensions: 850 x 315
Sources files: Fbesoc Logo.zip (8.82 MB)
Due: Monday Week 7

Easiest brief all semester hu? Can't wait to see everyone's cool work!

President's Welcome 2012

Being a Built Environment student shouldn’t just be about submissions, design studios and all-nighters. It should also be about gallery and exhibition visits, design competitions, weekly social gatherings, sketch club, parties, midnight milo meetings during exams, movie nights, a community zine and most importantly making friends with other students from across our faculty. This is what the Faculty of the Built Environment Society is here to do; create a vibrant faculty wide student community by running social events, organising academic events, encouraging creativity and supporting students.

Since Fbesoc’s first AGM last August our new faculty community has been slowly growing. As we grow there will be more social events, more academic events and a more active, vibrant student community at our faculty. The more students become involved the easier it will become for Fbesoc to organise larger events like the very exciting prospect of a faculty ball or harbour cruise. Basically the more you get involved the more Fbesoc will be able to give back to the students! The first events for the semester have already started happening and I hope all of you will be able to join us in not only attending but also helping organise future events.

What happens during this semester and year will not just be up to the executives of the society but everyone in the faculty. We want you all to participate in the thinking up of new events, planning, organising and running of society events as much as possible. Getting involved will be a great way to not only meet other students, but also to help shape the Built Environment community. In week 7 we will be holding a General Meeting to fill some position vacancies (details coming soon) and introduce some changes that will make it much easier for students to get involved in the society. So make sure you keep a look out for this and other society events happening soon.

Finally, a word of advice to all the first years starting at our faculty this semester, remember to make your time at university as fun and interesting as you possibly can. It’s an exciting place full of new ideas and interesting people that can only be experienced fully if you go out and get involved. Fbesoc is here to make this easier within our faculty so make sure you join us at any of our events, you will not regret it!

See you around,

Jeremiasz Sieczko

Fbesoc President

SONA Sign-ups tomorrow!

SONA (Student Organised Network for Architecture) is the official student body of the Australian Institute of Architects. They represent architecture students from across Australia and organise various events like FLUX & Superstudio. The UNSW SONA Reps are running a Sign-up day outside the Red Centre tomorrow between 12.00pm-5.00pm. Be sure to join them & you'll get some cool goodies and some excellent members benefits!

Where: Outside the Red Centre
When: 12.00pm-5.00pm, Tuesday, 27th March 2012
Link: http://www.facebook.com/events/229535473810959/

Student Opportunity: European Architecture Students Assembly (EASA) 2012

We start the semester with the first Student Opportunity post of the year. The European Architecture Students Assembly (or EASA) is calling for architecture students to participate in the 32nd assembly which is to take place in Helsinki, Finland between 16-29/07/2012.

EASA is an annual student run, non-profit event, comprising of workshops, lectures, study tours and discussions. It is hosted by a different country each year and allows students to learn about architecture and the practice of it outside of their country, both from each other and professionals, with a particular focus on the host city. The theme of this years assembly is Wastelands, exploring the potential of empty, insufficiently used and neglected urban in-between-zones in the built environment.

Every year a number of places are set aside for non-European students to be part of the EASA International Team.

It looks like a great opportunity to expose yourself to international understandings of architecture and problems/possible solutions facing cities, as well as form valuable international networks. To apply to be apart of the assembly, students a re asked to submit a 12 second video exploring the theme of Wastelands by the 12th March accompanied by a cover letter explaining their reasons for wishing to attend. Details of this competition can be found in the document below.

Open publication - Free publishing - More 2012

For more information about the event make sure you check out wastelands.fi as well as get in touch with the international contacts (international.easa@gmail.com) should you have any questions!

Video: Flux 2011 Opening Party Installation

Things have been a little serious on this blog recently, so here's a cool time-lapse video of a plastic bottle sculpture being created for the Flux opening party in 2011! They reused more than 8000 plastic water bottles to make this happen.. For those of you who don't know, Flux is the Australia and New Zealand Student Architecture Congress held once every two years (next ones in 2013) organised by SONA/AIA. If you want to know more then check out the Flux website as well as the videos from the event and follow Flux on twitter!

Discussion: Three things that could change the Faculty for the better

Three things that could change the Faculty of the Built Environment for the better:

More design thinking will teach us the best ways to solve design problems.  There is a growing school of thought that encourages applying a process of design thinking to solve problems. Governments, big-businesses and schools worldwide are beginning to realise the potential of thinking creatively to fix things that aren’t working but we aren’t being guided towards this new way of thinking. Currently we’re being taught to evolve our own process of approaching a brief from beginning to end but is this still the most relevant way of teaching students how to think? Back in the day there were a lot more contact hours with tutors/mentors having a lot more time to sculpt the design approach students take and suggest why a particular approach might not be suitable.  Students had the opportunity to be exposed to the approach tutors have learnt from experience.  It is debatable whether this is still possible with diminishing contact hours and increasing class sizes, in a 4 hour studio with 15 students a tutor only has 16 minutes with each student a week. This is hardly enough time to help each student to learn how to think. What we need is an alternative approach to teaching design thinking. We need to be taught the process of approaching a design and the theory behind why this is the best way; we can’t just be expected to find our own way.  What I’m talking about is already being taught elsewhere in schools like the Strelka Institute in Moscow or the Stanford d.school, students are being taught how to think more directly. The d.school actually has a bunch of designthinking resources available for anyone to just pick up and use, they break down the design thinking process into five modes: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Possible solutions would be to run compulsory design thinking workshops for all students in the faculty or have a core-design thinking course in all BE degrees.

Subscribing to Lynda.com would solve the problem of many BE courses not providing enough software learning resources. You’d think that since learning a particular piece of software (Sketchup, Autocad, Revit, 3dsMax, Photoshop, Indesign ) is usually an integral part of learning how to design then the courses we pick up should teach us how to use them.. unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Courses often expect students to “jump right in” and start using new software straight away, as a result leaving many students to self-learn software with little resources (if any) while still being required to meet other course outcomes. The fact is that not all the resources we need when learning these software packages are always available to us for free on the internet. Whether we can find the most appropriate resources at the time is another problem (one that Fbesoc is attempting to resolve with the dwiki). Purchasing an institutional subscription would automatically fix this problem by providing students access to quality tutorials on just about every piece of software students are expected to learn. Up until this happens students will have to pay an extra US$250 for something they are technically already paying for.

Architecture 2030 asks architecture schools from across the globe to do one thing and that’s to add the following design requirement to every brief given to students:

"the design engage the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or eliminates the need for fossil fuel"

The idea being to establish an awareness of the environmental impact architecture has and the consequences of design decisions. Currently, the building industry accounts for as much as 30% of the world’s energy consumption; adding the requirement to student briefs is part of the Architecture 2030 challenge to make the building industry carbon-neutral by 2030. The architecture program at UNSW already requires students to complete two core environment courses which educate students to take into consideration environmental factor when designing, so it only makes sense to follow through and connect the theory with the practical design studios. Doing so would ensure students get a practical understanding of how to reduce the environmental impact of the buildings they design as well as learn how to be creative in these solutions.

What do you think could change the Faculty for the better? Leave your comments below!

Competition: Aurora Borealis Observatory

Arch Medium is organise and run international student design competition to give students the opportunity to get involved in academic Architecture, design and city planning competitions under the same conditions as in professional competitions.

Right now they're running a competition to design a Aurora Borealis Observatory which will allow people to reconnect with the wonders of nature. Definitely worth checking out!

Website: http://en.archmedium.com/Concursos/OBA/Summary.php

Come help us out during O-week 2012!

And we're back with some excellent news for you all, fbesoc will be at O-week 2012! We're going to have our own stall and everything! There's talk of textas, coloured pencils, architectural cherades, drawing comps, zines, and maybe even jenga! All will be revealed at O-week 2012!

In the mean time we're on the look out for volunteers to help us man & woman the fbesoc stall. O-week will be held from Monday 20th February to Friday 24th February and the fbesoc stall will open for all of it. If you'd like to get involved in the fun and are free to help out on any of those days then please shoot us an email to contact@fbesoc.com and we'll get you in the loop!

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

Masters of Architecture Graduation Exhibition

Wow. What an excellent venue for a graduation exhibition! Who ever organised this Masters of Architecture Graduation Exhibition obviously knew what they were doing (& had the money/resources  to do it)! Inside the always cool Pier 2/3 in Walshbay the FULLSCALE201:1 Exhibition created a fantastic atmosphere full of makeshift milk crate chairs (which we could probably do more with in the Red Centre), lively music, free drinks (more of that too please), a lot of faculty who's who (including the Dean), a lot of Architecture Studies and Architectural Computing graduates and of course the whole purpose for the event: the nine graduation studios. These nine graduation studios explored everything from revitalising Newtown to designing architecture for Alzheimer sufferers, presenting some great solutions and fascinating ideas. But what was really impressive was the quality and use of physical (and some digital) models to investigate, communicate and understand graduates solutions to the various studios. The use of different materials, methods & approaches was really evident and eye opening for any undergraduate student (especially when you see these things with your own eyes); seeing how clay can be used to develop an idea or how a model can be constructed to clearly communicate a solution was particularly enlightening (perspex is awesome!).  

A rather interesting exhibition presenting the work of students who know what they're doing. I only walked away feeling a little disappointed that we as undergraduate students don't really get an opportunity to get to know these Masters students and gain a better understanding of the thinking that influences the these newest Australian architecture graduates. 

If you have the tomorrow (Sunday 27th before 12noon) time then go check out FULLSCALE201:1, it's an interesting visit. If you can't make it then you can also always check out the website here.