My emergency housing community

Designed to encourage community spirit in the event of a natural disaster, with communal work areas to keep people busy and allow a sense of achievement.

 

A piece on UNSW Art & Design

“We’ve long known, however, that having one person stand up in front of a class or large group doesn’t get the best results. As Confucius so famously said; “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

While great teachers will always be at the heart of great education, no matter where they teach and whatever their surrounds, the design and flexibility of the buildings we teach and learn in, and the infrastructure and technology embedded within them, can go a long way to enhancing educational experiences and outcomes.

In our re-imagined and rebuilt campus, UNSW Art and Design (formerly COFA), we are teaching for a globalised, ultra-networked future in which the most important skills our graduates will take away are transferable across disciplines — like creativity, originality and the ability to size up and solve complex problems.

While proficiencies working with a particular craft skill, design software or even the evocative sweep of a student’s paintbrush on canvas can tell us a lot about today’s achievements there is only one thing we know for certain about the future. That is, the profound, disruptive changes digital technologies have unleashed will continue to take us in directions we haven’t even dreamed of. A truly valuable art and design education prepares students to work critically and innovatively, no matter what our future societies and economies throw at them.

The intellectual backdrop to every great art and design school is the role of art in challenging conventional world views and asking hard, often uncomfortable questions. That’s why combining art and design practice with research and theoretical inquiry is so important.

It is becoming ever more apparent that critical and creative ways of thinking are vital to understanding our modern world. Which means the same goes for great art and design schools.

Why? Because artists and designers understand our image saturated, mediatised, experiential and material world. Their creativity, originality and inventiveness elicit deep human responses to the most perplexing aspects of contemporary life.

Whatever our future holds one thing is for certain: we need more real world critical spaces of inquiry to engage, encourage and support the most creative thinkers and makers of our times.

- Professor Ross Harley. September 30, 2014,  The Australian newspaper

Huxley : The History of Tension 1957

"Tension (stress) is a form of disease...The sick are aware only of their private pains and miseries...[it] is more or less completely independent of time and place... [and] the disease [has] arisen under all cultural conditions"

"In every human culture certain procedures for achieving temporary self-transcendence, and thereby relieving tension, have been developed and systematically employed... There are the chemical methods, the musical and gymnastic methods... the influence of crowds, the various religious methods and, finally ...the yogas and spiritual exercises of Oriental and Western tradition"