Meet Our New Staff
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Dr Sarah Benton |
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Dr Richard de Dear Associate Professor Richard has joined the Architectural Sciences discipline of the Faculty. Richard is a world leader in thermal comfort as the adaptive model for naturally ventilated buildings he developed with Dr Gail Brager was adopted as an engineering standard. Read more... |
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Dr William Martens |
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Dr Martin Tomitsch Lecturer, Design Computing Martin has been appointed as a Lecturer in Design Computing. His research deals with user interfaces that go beyond traditional desktop computing applications. He is especially interested in synergies between architectural concepts and ubiquitous computing environments. Read more... |
Dr Sarah Benton
Dr. Sarah Benton has been appointed as an Associate Lecturer in Digital Architecture. Sarah’s current research develops themes identified in her PhD thesis, titled The Architectural Designer and Their Digital Media: an investigation into the extent to which it is advantageous to include digital media as part of the designers’ ‘toolset’ in the early stages of design.
Q: What attracted you to the position at Sydney University?
As a young designer and academic, the Associate Lecturer in Digital Architecture position at the University of Sydney offered me a challenging opportunity to extend my knowledge and experience in architectural design research and teaching. I hope to extend the focussed and autonomous teaching program set in place by my predecessors and continue to foster avenues to explore creative applications with the digital facilities.
I also have a high regard of the connection to interdisciplinary practices at the USyd architecture faculty. The faculty’s close proximity and integration of the Tin Sheds art workshops, the urban and sustainable design units and the computational expertise within the Design Lab ensure that, as a member of faculty and as a student, you are often exposed to practices beyond architectural design itself. I am hopeful that the exposure encourages interesting avenues for research and teaching.
Q: What are you currently researching?
My current research develops themes identified in my PhD thesis, titled The Architectural Designer and Their Digital Media: an investigation into the extent to which it is advantageous to include digital media as part of the designers’ ‘toolset’ in the early stages of design. My practice-based action-research study was one part of a larger Embedded Practice Research ARC Grant that placed PhD scholars within existing architectural and engineering practices to explore the implications of integrating advanced digital media. My thesis presented an expose of contemporary collaborative designing and demonstrated creative gains, disturbances, and evolutions in integrating digital media in the early stages of design and within practice.
Q: Your PhD looked at the worth of digital media as a tool in the early stages of architectural design. Do you think there is wide industry acceptance of digital architecture developments?
As a young architectural practitioner and academic, it interested me that the architectural design community still continues to polarise between championing the role of digital media as part of their design processes and downright rejecting it. I was aware of the concerns through personal experience, reviewed the issue through available literature and presented the arguments in my thesis. In general, firms continue to employ digital media for documentation and presentation purposes only and/or rarely explore advanced, unconventional digital media available for extending design. There is a reluctance to adopt new practices from fear, time, collaboration and/or money pressures.
I used my review of the issue as a foreground to demonstrating what I believe to be the more interesting question of how, constructively, can a designer integrate advanced, unconventional digital design media for creative practice. Resulting from my studies, I am aware of the issues in integrating such media, but am also aware that, for interested and engaged parties in a design team, change and expanding the toolset of a designer can occur organically and progressively. As I concluded in my thesis, digital media has a significant role to play in generative designing, yet they should not actually take centre stage. Through the mutuality that exists in the relationship between designer and their digital media, changes can occur where digital media not only integrates with design, but also both media and design practice changes through their integration.
Q: As an Associate and Senior Designer at Terroir, you worked on a number of varied projects. What are the highlights of your professional career?
I was very fortunate to have worked in Terroir during their early years, as they grew from a small company of 5 to the mid-sized practice of 25 they are today. The expansion afforded me insights into an emerging practice and opportunities that would be available to few other practitioners, for example undertaking PhD research. Through my contributions, I gained a privileged position working alongside the Design Directors, based in Sydney and Hobart. I was also privileged to have worked with a considerable amount of talented designers, who came to collaborate with Terroir from all over the world.
My major contributions and project highlights include Hazards Hotel 2002-2006, Peppermint Bay Function Centre 2002, Prague Library Competition 2006, Maitland City Bowling Club 2006-2007 and 86-88 George Street Canopy 2006-2008.
Q: In terms of teaching, what do you think are the core elements of good design?
The way we are exploring ‘good’ digital architectural design at USyd is to consider the process of design as much as the end products of design, which is historically the main focus of assessment in architectural education and the main focus in practicing architecture. Good digital architectural design considers the diverse influences on architecture from context, human use, poetics and tectonics, pragmatics, etc and employs advanced, or unconventional, digital media so the tools play a fundamental role within the design. Whilst the tools are not the central focus, the core elements of a good digital design acknowledge the mutuality that exists between the architectural designer and their digital media.
Associate Professor Richard de Dear
Associate Professor Richard de Dear has joined the Architectural Sciences discipline of the Faculty. Richard is a world leader in thermal comfort as the adaptive model for naturally ventilated buildings he developed with Dr Gail Brager was adopted as an engineering standard.
Q: What attracted you to working at Sydney University?
For the last seventeen years I've been working in an environmental science discipline at Macquarie University but been very much isolated because I didn't have this luxury of having a group of colleagues that spoke the same language as me. Except for a brief stint in my post doc years in the mid-eighties in the Technical University of Denmark, that was really the closest I got to working in an architectural setting but in terms of having a nice critical mass of colleagues in the same area, I've never had that in Australia. Given that my research is about buildings, energy and climate change, I think I can achieve a lot more in the last fifteen years of my career in an environment like we’ve got here.
Another big attraction is that I'm going to be talking to teaching practitioners so that's a tantalising prospect to start influencing the way architects do their business in Australia. The way buildings are constructed effects the energy consumption of those buildings for the next fifty to one hundred years so it will be nice to have that direct influence on things.
Q: As an early leader in the field of thermal comfort, the increasing global awareness of climate change must have made your job a little easier. Do you think current trends in policy and industry are responding adequately to the challenges we face?
I think we are somewhat behind because there appears to be no master plan in Australia but it has only been eighteen months since we've had a change of Government. I think that’ll come but its kind of hard to expect a complete cultural change so quickly.
To give you an example of a master plan, in 2003 the European Parliament passed a directive called the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) which spells out minimum energy efficiency levels for all buildings. It didn't go so far as determining how that is to happen but said this is the target and member countries have to comply with it, whatever way they choose. So that sparked a rash of standards changes and building code responses in different parts of the European Community. It permeates the whole regulatory environment of the building sector and that's how change starts to happen. The inspiring thing for Australia is we now have some great examples to look at and not just copy but further refine and adapt to our climate and built environmental context.
Q: Your adaptive model for naturally ventilated buildings which you developed with Dr Gail Brager was made an international engineering and design standard in 2004. It has been widely implemented internationally which is a great achievement. What do you think is the next step in this area?
That research work was published way back in 1998 so it is actually ten years old now and it didn't really have much impact until it got written into ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) standards. Its actually been written into other parts of the world as a standard such as the Netherlands and it certainly influenced the European standard which replicated the research and have written their own standard that looks very similar in format in what we did with the American standard.
In terms of the future, we've got to start putting the standard into practice and that could be in a whole stack of ways. I'm very interested in mixed mode buildings. A mixed mode building can be naturally ventilated as much of the year as possible. In the Sydney climate, maybe in the months of February when it gets humid and a little uncomfortable, we might resort to air conditioning in moderation for that period of the year. But for the rest of the year we don't really need to have it running all the time – you can just open a window and I'd like to see more of that. The beauty of that is that it can be retro fitted. Its not a thing that's going to rely on every new building being designed in that way. We can actually start looking at old buildings and adapt them to operate in that way.
Q: Is this where your research is heading?
There are all sorts of research possibilities in the area of mixed mode buildings which I'm getting very interested in at the moment. We've got a grant from the US Green Buildings Council for a collaboration with some colleagues from Berkley, the University of Colorado as well as the Frankfurt Institute and a couple of other universities in Germany. We've got a team of people looking at the computer algorithms that we put into building energy management systems in mixed mode buildings asking the question when does the switch over occur? And how?
Let's say we're running this naturally ventilated building and decided that at two o'clock this afternoon the conditions outdoors suggest that we're turning it into an air conditioned building for the remainder of the afternoon. We do that - but at what temperature do we run it at? In the natural ventilated mode at half past one it was probably clipping 27 degrees inside and we've deemed that just on the threshold of discomfort. We want to pull it back with air conditioning but how far do we pull it back? Do we pull it all the way back to the standard 22 degrees which is the guidelines for air conditioning or do we temperate it slightly and just pick 25 or 26? These questions are now areas in which research needs to be done and that’s what we're doing in this project.
Q: At the University of Sydney, you'll be teaching in the Sustainability area which has a lot of cross over with your previous work. Do you see must scope for cross disciplinary research within the University?
I think there are some exciting prospects. I have always been a fringe dweller and never really fit into any single discipline. I mean thermal comfort - what is that? It is as much psychology as anything and certainly a good dose of physiology but also architecture and also mechanical engineering. Without question, the research that other disciplines are doing influences architecture and vice versa so putting them together, cohabiting, interacting and collaborating is a very exciting prospect.
Associate Professor William Martens
Associate Professor William Martens has joined the Faculty as Associate Professor in Audio and Acoustics. His interest in the influence of architectural acoustics on both musical performance and musical sound reproduction has inspired his research as a perceptual psychologist specializing in spatial hearing research and the simulation of virtual acoustical spaces for human interaction.
Q: What attracted you to working at Sydney?
First and foremost, I was attracted to working in Sydney because of the people I knew at Sydney Uni. Although I hope to be working closely with newly-met colleagues within the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, I have for several years been in regular communication with the coordinator of the Faculty’s Audio and Acoustics program, Densil Cabrera. He and I will be collaborating with Faculty members within other disciplines at the University of Sydney, such as Engineering and Physiology. I am quite excited by the prospect of interdisciplinary research collaboration in the field of spatial audio. The most productive research in spatial audio requires knowledge in acoustics, signal processing, and human spatial hearing, and these disciplines are well represented by my colleagues here in Sydney, with whom long-ranging research plans are already in place.
The main focus of our research in spatial audio will be to develop an understanding of relations between physical measurements of acoustic phenomena, and human perceptual responses to those phenomena. The phenomena under study range from speech intelligibility in typical room acoustics (both for normally-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners), to an appreciation of musical sound (both in live performances and in reproduction). The results of this research effort are expected to have consequences for improved musical sound reproduction over headphones and loudspeakers, and may have implications for the improved design of hearing aids.
I am also most personally engaged in work with local students and faculty on the development of spatial auditory displays for information sonification. Although auditory display technology has been in use widely for warnings and alarms, and in specialized applications such as sonar, the value of data sonification is only beginning to be recognized in applications that have been dominated by visual information displays. What will be uncovered in the years to come are the applications for which auditory display technology provides particular advantages, such as the hearing of patterns over time that are not so readily detected in visual display. Audio can also provide a more global perspective on the observer’s environment than a visual display, since human vision is focused frontally, while spatial auditory display allows for human listening in all directions at once. This makes auditory display particularly well suited for exploratory analysis, such as that typically performed in data mining applications. Of course, spatial auditory display can also make it possible to listen to a newly-designed architectural space, before construction begins. The potential here is to allow observers to move though virtual architectural spaces, perhaps yielding insights for designers (who should hear what the new spaces sound like, and not just how they will look).
Such in-advance inspections (or walkthroughs) can potentially avoid costly retrofits that might be required if the acoustical behavior of the space turns out badly, and acoustical treatment would be required for more optimal use of the space.
Dr Martin Tomitsch
Dr. Martin Tomitsch has been appointed as a Lecturer in Design Computing. His research deals with user interfaces that go beyond traditional desktop computing applications. He is especially interested in synergies between architectural concepts and ubiquitous computing environments.
Q: What attracted you to work at Sydney University?
I spent six months at the Design Lab in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning during a research visit in 2008 and was impressed by the group’s research approach. I’ve always been very interested in multidisciplinary working environments and I believe that the Design Lab is a very unique place in this regard. I also had the chance to tutor one of the studios last year and was fascinated by the students’ creativity. It is fun to teach and work in such an environment and that’s what mainly attracted me to Sydney University.
Q: What are you currently researching?
I’m interested in investigating the impacts of technology on user behaviour. Human computer interfaces are often poorly designed which makes interaction very frustrating for users. In my research, I investigate how new technologies can be integrated into everyday environments to improve the user experience. This sometimes means placing computing technologies into unsought contexts; for example I designed visual displays for the architectural ceiling as part of my PhD research. I’m also interested in exploring ways that existing technologies can be adapted to improve the quality of life of users. For example the introduction of mobile phones in Africa has provided people who have never had bank accounts with mobile-banking services. I recently founded the platform ICT4D.at together with two colleagues from Vienna to push forward research on information and communication technologies for development.
Q: Your original training was based in informatics but you had a strong pull towards design. How did you progress from a programming/engineering background into a more design based direction?
I would say that it was almost the opposite. I was always very interested in design, but eventually went to a college for engineering, which was the foundation of my interest in computing technologies, and later led to the decision to study informatics. So I think it was a natural progression that had to happen. Working in the field of human-computer interaction allows me to combine my various backgrounds and interests. Again, in that regard the Design Lab and the new master program M.IDEA is very unique and a great opportunity for students because they get to take courses that provide them with both design and technical skills.
Q: Your interests are very much based in human/technological interaction design that incorporates concepts from very diverse fields. What do you think are the key elements that underpin good interaction design?
There are two key elements that are inevitable for good interaction design - an understanding for the various disciplines that add to the quality of user interfaces and an understanding of the users and their expectations. The main reason why so many interfaces fail is that the people who build them don't understand the users' needs. Good interaction design requires the involvement of users from the very beginning. There are many well-established methodologies available that provide a framework for a user-centred design process, which I also use in my research.
Q: Technology is moving far from traditional desktop computing, where do you think the next big developments are going to be which will change our daily lives?
In the last decade some exciting paradigms emerged in the research world, like tangible computing, where digital information is linked with physical objects. Some of those paradigms looked very promising to be the next big evolution step in human-computer interaction. However looking at recent developments and their impacts on user behaviours, I believe that we will see another decade of screen-based interaction, where screens will leave the desktop and increasingly inhabit our daily environments, like building facades, walls, tables. At the same time mobile devices will become smaller and even more pervasive. The challenges will be to design interactions with those ubiquitous displays (e.g. how can you interact with a building façade or a mobile phone that uses a mini projector for output) as well as interaction between different devices/displays (e.g. a public display might remind me of my next appointment when I walk past).
Q: You are also teaching in the new Interaction Design & Electronic Arts program. What will you be teaching and what are you looking forward to most about this program?
I will be co-teaching the Human Computer Interaction course together with Dr Xiangyu Wang in semester 1 and the Device Studio with Dr Andrew Vande Moere in Semester 2. I’m excited to meet the students and learn about their backgrounds and motivation to enrol for this program. I assume that most of them will have a strong interest in design. It will be a new experience for me to teach in a more design-oriented environment and I’m looking forward to seeing highly creative and exciting student projects emerge during the courses.