Digitalisation has become a new normal. Spaces and experiences that once had an actual state have become translated and diffused into a screen. Whilst this mode of encounter has enabled further accessibility, has digital actualisation of physical spaces resulted in a degree of disconnection?

A Speculative Svalbard is a research proposal that investigates the relationship between science and theatre through the digitalisation of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway.

A building of safekeeping, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores seeds from all over the world as a means of protection. If there are catastrophes or worldwide disasters, this building and the processes involved become a safety net. Through this act, the seeds stored are planted back into their origin, protecting the geological histories of these landscapes.

Due to the nature of this building, the experience and processes remain strictly confidential to the outside world. This project utilises theatre as a device to understand the hidden processes that surround the site of Svalbard. Techniques of gesture, film and the mise-en-scène become a means to generate a theatrical set. These techniques are complemented with the scientific information surrounding Svalbard, informing an experience that blurs the actual and the speculative; “a mediated experience, at once both historic and contemporary; real and fictional.” [1]

This theatrical set is highly speculative and utilises objects and props that illustrate a moment in the seed process. The inaccuracy and playfulness of these spaces allow the viewer to place their own narratives upon these spaces. This theatrical approach provides an accessible activation for Svalbard, creating an opportunity for public inclusivity and connection.

1. Fryatt, Anthony. “Mediated Interior: Subjective and Empowering Productions.” PhD diss., Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, (2016).

Children today have fewer opportunities for outdoor free play or regular contact with nature, especially in cities where outdoor space is increasingly limited. This research explores strategies for abstracting nature for the design of indoor space. I have applied this approach to the design for city kids an early learning centre in an urban context. It seeks to provide the benefits of outdoor learning which contribute to children’s well-being. The design approach merges with the childcare curriculum to include environmental education in the daily activities.

The project abstracts qualities of the natural environment such as texture, form and undulation of the terrain. It also seeks to invite natural elements such as breeze, sunlight and plants. Titled “Mountain|Sea” the design conceptualises the building as above and below the ground and simulates some of the qualities of exploring such places. Aspects of risk are introduced through surface textures, and terrain found on the mountain. Risk taking allows children to develop good decision-making and also improves their coordination which together benefits their self-esteem. The building facade is used to create a dynamic and immersive experience of exploring and viewing world under water. Ephemeral qualities of the sea are also introduced such as ripples caused by wind and reflection and refraction of sunlight. The design seeks to create a richly diverse built environment for children to explore and interact with qualities of nature.

I see the abstraction of nature as a valuable approach for remedying the lack of natural environments in cities especially for children’s well-being and early development.

The global disruptions of 2020 are a wake-up call. Climate-induced bush fires and a zoonotic pandemic are a warning sign that our relationship with the living world is in chaos. We not only live in a moment called the Anthropocene, but we are the Anthropocene; our present condition positioning humans as a global agent of destruction of incomprehensible spatial and temporal scale.

Anthropo[scenes] is a research major project that aims to develop a method of interrogating these incomprehensible scales through local, human-scale spatializations. Identifying the Anthropocene as a convergence of geological, technological and cultural forces, this research major project is situated within a petrochemical landscape; Burwood Highway in Melbourne. The inherent accelerated qualities of the site are extracted through film and audio documentation, with visual and temporal post-processing producing Anthropo[scenes]; iterative outcomes that apprehend and subvert the prevailing anthropogenic systems.

Responsive to the present moment, this major project has developed into a non-didactic practice of resistance, engaging with ideas of interruption and broadcasting as experimental methods of intervening into destructive systems. Anthropo[scenes] is positioned as a trajectory for future practice, aligning interior tactics with those of activism and agency to develop an ongoing and engaged interrogation into the human impact on the living world.

Leftoverness is an urban condition, a residual space with no apparent value. The urban environment comprises of many residual spaces, which over time assemble through the changes in the city fabric and built form. Leftoverness is a kind of dystopia of hidden memories and qualities. Often these spaces have an absence of invitation and lack a sense of place. 


This research project explores how leftover spaces are spatial-temporal situations. Situated in the city the interventions activate the social, historical and atmospheric conditions. The research explores how revitalising awareness and appreciation can shift the use of these spaces. Intervening into multiple leftover sites with heritage background they connect as a network across the Melbourne city – a series of momentary communal spaces for different kinds of social engagement – temporarily re-emerge hidden histories and latent sites in a present form. A scaffolding system is integrated as a language which commonly implicates a visual leftover condition within the city. The adaptability of the framework enables each site intervention to be specific and operate elastically. The potential of the leftovers can be connected as a system to form a dialogue with community, to allow a new visual experience and encounter with Leftoverness.

Appreciating Leftoverness explores how people will need to adapt to the current situation and behave differently in the city whilst also considering the environmental impacts and the rules of social distancing whilst also reimagining the past uses of the site, to manifest a dualism of activation. Through material traces and ways to reveal and stimulate traces, surfaces and memories, the activation works in different ways to narrate specific histories, which also includes the technique of reframing through processes of citation, proximity and reflection.

The archivist is a collector; through the collection of traces, and artefacts, put into organization to produce knowledge and information. Conventionally, archives intend to contain and preserve, creating an understanding of the past through artefacts. The archives I have created experiment with this notion of preservation to exist in a state of becoming. Through a speculative framework of past, present and future the archive has the potential to be undone and redone with no finite outcome.

Archive as Practice is a process-led project and an exploration into the process of archiving in relation to the practice of interior design. The research aims to challenge, question and recontextualise conventional and institutional ways of archiving through the collection and assemblage of ephemera and questioning the role of cultural value through the process.
Archive as Practice questions what we deem within a social context important enough to maintain, save and essentially what the cultural significance is we place upon these sites.

The process has engaged in a practice of archiving through collecting, documenting and re-presenting temporal and material conditions, from a series of disused or inaccessible sites. Through digital and physical publications, the archive is produced through multiple mediums and distributed across multiple platforms. Working with three sites, the south side Magdalen Laundry, Kooyong station control booth and a private domestic house, each in a state of disuse, the Archive as Practice produces an encounter with the conditions that have been collected, researched and uncovered within these interiors.
The research project has developed a series of in-situ explorations and material led approaches through audio recording, digital site mapping, citation and fragmented extraction.

At [not in a] Home highlights the importance of home[making] – the process of making home – placing emphasis on home as an interior produced through everyday routines, practices and embodied gestures. Through research and creative exploration into everyday home[making] practices, At [in a] Home emphasises the importance of practicing everyday routines, habits, rituals and embodied gestures that enables us to produce selfhood[1] and place.

This project proposes an alternative approach to designing aged care living; one that foregrounds home[making], autonomy and embodied selfhood among residents. How can embodied gestures and our everyday practice influence our sense of selfhood and place? How could our everyday home[making] practice connect us to broader society? Through documentation, intervention, performance, photography, film and storytelling techniques, this project begins to unfold new ways of approaching aged care living design; embedding aged care within the city, creating community connections and promoting an intergenerational model of living.

By utilising real-life stories of individuals who live, work and occupy aged care living spaces, At in a Home begins to extrapolate individual home[making] practices to propose a new model for aged care living; one that aims to give accessibility for aged care residents for self-expression, home[making], health and wellbeing, whilst reimagining new ways of designing aged care spaces that allows for community connection, autonomy and personalised care. Engaging in a maltogenic[2] approach, this project proposes the significance home[making] has to nurturing physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing, and the potential this approach has to developing a new model for aged care living spaces.

[1] Selfhood: having and maintaining an individual identity; individuality

[2] Salutogenisis/Salutogenics: a medical approach that supports health and wellbeing, rather than factors that cause illness – a preventative approach in contrast to a treatment approach, focusing on the relationship between health, wellbeing and mental factors (stress, coping, outlook on situation)

Atmospheric Interactions explores movement in experience as ways to heighten sociability and interaction in public space. Sited in central market, Phnom Penh Cambodia, the project inserts layers of interaction into the existing interiors altering the way people would normally move and behave in the space.

Shared spaces are often open in their program to different activities and occupied by a general crowd made up of different backgrounds. It also allows people to express loose behaviour of movement in the existing site conditions. Atmospheric Interaction investigates how design insertions can produce different atmospheric experiences and provoke more people to play, socially and interact, aiming to create positive changes in the market.

Atmospheric Interactions re-purposes waste materials found in the market to design back into the market. Through a series of physical modelling, sketching and photography are used to explore the relationship of how design intervention and materials work in the area. The interventions into different locations and situations within the market shift normal interactions and improved the quality of experience that occur when encountering the different materials.

Atmospheric Interactions questions how this can affect their behaviour or productive in the space. The intervention is designed to attract people attention to the layers of interaction encouraging activities such as seeing, resting, sitting and talking and improved the quality of market shopping experience. Each intervention offers more engagement between people and the surrounding space.

By understanding the way people move, with different materials the design seeks to improve the quality of interaction between one another and the market more broadly. Atmospheric Interaction explores interior design’s role in creating vibrant social public spaces.

Atmospheres are continuously shifting, forming, and adapting in, and to, space. How can we intensify, activate, and intervene into these experiences, and how do we practice an openness to allow these sometimes-subtle shifts to affect our encounters and experiences within these interiors?

Due to Covid-19, the public is taking time to get out of their houses and go for walks as an escape from the walls they are confined by. The inability to travel far has allowed us to acknowledge and appreciate the local and ultra-local interiors and spaces we can access.

Atmospheric Interiors locates itself along the Moonee Ponds Creek and investigates how shifting intensities of atmospheres could create new experiences for those who encounter them. Through the designing of activations and interventions, Atmospheric Interiors investigated the notions of atmospheric intensities through navigation and negotiation along the creek. Challenging the perception, usage and experience of the Moonee Ponds Creek, this Major Project has explored the concept of an atmospheric journey, through various materials, climates, seasons, and social encounters.

Back to [Abomey] is a repatriated exhibition design proposal for Benin’s lost artifacts, returning them back to the Royal Palace of Abomey, where they originally came from. It explores how exhibition techniques can draw from and address de-colonization.

Pushing back on traditional exhibitions and museums, which display artifacts within a specific interior room. Back to [Abomey] displays artifacts in an in-between area of interior and exterior. The exhibition sets are located in the courtyard of the palace to emphasize importance these artefacts have outside a museum context.

Each plinth is designed sensitively to the site, time, cultural background and artifacts. Containing two parts, the daily exhibition of artifacts located separately within the palace and ceremonial display of artifacts coming together in one courtyard. This aims to give the value of celebrating repatriation through placing them together in their original birthplace.

Back to [Abomey] uses local, traditional and recycle materials including mahogany and wood along with “traditional” western museum display styles. These local materials re-used in this way creates a combination between the tradition of the past and the present.

Back to [Abomey] is interested in the impacts of cultural restitution and ways of displaying works in and outside of a gallery context. The movement of the artefacts back to their origin helps youths and local people with the reconstruction of memory, and a cultural self-reinvention.

In our current era of economic globalization and rising nationalism, the importance of nature and its protection appears to be an unresolvable issue. My design project seeks to reengage audiences with environmental awareness as well as a deeper understanding of the philosophical ideas of interrelatedness and interdependence that inform Chinese civilization.

Drawing specifically on “Wuxing” – the Chinese five elements philosophy that views specific elements as representative of different aspects of nature as well as civilization. It finds inherent connection between elements, phases, societal events and phenomena generally. The philosophy provides a model of a dynamic circulatory natural system that emphasizes the strong relationship and connection between each of the traditional elements: earth, water, wood, fire and metal.

Korean artist and philosopher Lee Ufan’s idea about “Infinity as something we don’t understand” and of the unknowable dimension of experience have been a significant inspiration to me, and pushed me to ask how exhibition design can embody these concerns and communicate to audiences potential solutions.

The project re-designs the 2019 National Gallery of Victoria exhibition “Terracotta Warriors & CaiGuoQiang.” Whilst this was an excellent showcase of Chinese cultural production I feel that this exhibition provided an ideal context to explore more deeply environmental and cultural concerns that effect all of us and the design opportunities that embody Wuxing philosophy.

My design project proposes an exploration of the five elements of “Wuxing” each in dialogue with the exhibited artworks of the exhibition. I have imagined an entirely restaged exhibition adding and subtracting elements. I have designed additional experiences for audiences that emphasise their role in interpreting events and completing the art experience. Here I draw inspiration from the principles of relational aesthetics which emphasizes the social interaction between audience members as well as Olaffur Eliasson’s immersive artworks that he argues are completed by audiences.

Being WELL proposes an intersect between our wellbeing and the built environment. This project challenges the structural and psychological integrity of the spaces we inhabit every day, to find solutions that support our overall wellbeing.

As we spend over 90% of our lives indoors it is crucial that our everyday spaces start to take on compassionate and considered design methodologies. This research shifts and challenges traditional definitions of wellness, to pose the question of how interiors can support us to become healthier and enable us to thrive. Contextually the focus of this research is specialised in the multi-residential sector of our built urban environment. This project explores the psychological effects of living in compressed and inexpensively developed vertical dwellings – highlighting the tremendous impact on our emotional and physical states. These spaces are built as homes, yet often lack basic access to natural light, influx of fresh air, communal space, outlook, outdoor space and safe selections of materials.

The intention behind working within an everyday environment such as an apartment, is to provide greater accessibility to the future of residential design. As residents often have less autonomy over the decisions made within their interior, making changes that affect layout, materiality and structural frameworks affect an entire buildings network, not just an individual’s residence. It is crucial that interior designers are involved during all phases of spatial planning and design, and not recruited post design development where only aesthetic alterations can be made.

Using an established multi-residential typology as a case study for betterment, the project proposes the importance of engaging considered design principles at an early stage of the design process. Using the body of research as a tool for design, existing design decisions from this case study are challenged and proposed with alternatives that would better facilitate the occupant’s wellbeing. An emphasis on light, air, non-toxic materials, outlook, space and perception will allow a series of re-imagined systems to form a methodology that can be applied to new built apartments. With the intention that this project will initiate awareness and conversation, around the realm of multi-residential living – striving to design supportive, restorative and healthy environments that do not compromise on health.

Screens, streams and cyber machines, these are the companions of 2020.

Digital frames and virtual planes, these are the domains which keep us sane.

Stepping into the new decade, nobody could have predicted how dramatically the world would change as a result of Covid-19. This research is derived from the altered modes of interaction and spatial inhabitation that see us transition into an increasingly interiorised and digitalised state.

On the cusp of the 4th Industrial Revolution, humankind is no longer limited to exclusively digital or physical realms. Data is leaping off 24” screens, now possessing the capacity to influence events in our tangible material worlds. As digital and physical converge, new qualities and opportunities occur. The increased digitisation of the world requires a renewed design methodology in response to this new normal.

Betwixt & Beyond explores the connections which arise from the interactions of body and space; the visible and invisible; apparatus and surface. This is tested in the context of digital-physical convergence in a civic building forecourt.

The shared physical social experience has been diminished by technological advancement and its impact realised once again with the emergence of the pandemic. This project aims to dissolve the perceived existence of a definitive boundary between the digital and physical, allowing technology to elevate, rather than detract. The eradication of the conventional perception of duality between the digital and physical offers us an enrichment of actuality. When the blurring of digital and analogue interiors create in-between spaces, what is our experience of reality when these realms converge?

These convergent interiors contribute to the emerging acceptance of a digital-physical world. Unlocking this great potential for enhancement of our current realities is both exciting and fraught.

The urgency to save our planet requires an all-in global effort. Through developing my environmental awareness I came to realise there is a need for this knowledge to be accessible by everyone. This requires conversation about the climate emergency to be had in every country, neighbourhood and household. Our current way of life needs to be questioned, and individuals empowered to act and have agency in change.

Can an interior design practice support communities to make positive environmental change by encouraging conversation, connection and care?

This research project explores how localised environmental action at a neighbourhood level could lead to meaningful change. By connecting existing environmental care groups with neighbourhood communities this project is intended to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and resources to generate action. The design aims to do this by re-establishing individuals connection with their own backyard. Instead of idly waiting for systemic change, local action is fostered through a community of care at a neighbourhood level.

A practice of diagramming, digital and physical modelling and photography are used to explore the relationship between the urban and natural environments. This interrogation has revealed strategies for strengthening connections between domestic interiors and nature.

The design proposal offers up a space which meets the immediate needs of an environmental community action group and provides public amenity to encourage engagement. Situated on an existing vacant lot the site will be revegetated with indigenous flora. Leading by example to generate conversation around gardening, composting and reduction of consumption it is hoped that this will foster broader neighbourhood engagement with bigger issues like the regeneration of coastal areas, restoring of biodiversity and caring for local ecosystems. As one of many nodes, this design could help push the change we need.

Hundreds of years ago, many people immigrated from other countries to Melbourne. Today, people are attracted to the city again for specific activities, such as developed institutions, hospitality and transportation. Undoubtedly, Melbourne is inclusive of people from different parts of world. Some of these people now live together in residential spaces as multi-generational families. Yet, we witness the city being incessantly demolished and brimming with construction every day. As a result, the cost of living booms and many families are forced to move to the surrounding suburbs to find a cheaper alternative.

However, the city is full of unutilized space. By utilizing these unique volumes and spaces in the streets of the city, people can reside in a more adaptive environment.

By exploring the laneways of Melbourne, it is clear that the tiny space would limit and squeeze out many parts so that people could share their private space. Thus, my intention is to investigate ‘how can transformative and adaptable techniques facilitate shared space for multigenerational families in the context of a small-scale residential design?’ In order to create a comfortable shared space, the function of the interior can be changed by simply transforming the objects in the house. By utilizing the volume of the street, the kitchen is used as a connecting co-space where people can be lead through and interact with each other. The exterior of building is activated to allow recreational activities. Undoubtedly, the project smears out the boundary of living in a private and public space in compact cities.

By using transformative techniques, residents not only can transform a private space into a public area at different times, it can also connect two spaces together by using the techniques of folding and [un]packing. I experimented with research in my own living space, an apartment, to understand the notion of activating the interior of residential spaces in new ways. Some techniques I have engaged with include [un]packing, stacking, arranging and folding.

In the future, tiny volumes and spaces have the potential to be explored through these techniques to produce new residential spaces. This major project investigates the possibilities of dwelling in these tiny volumes and spaces, helping to reimagine new concepts of living in cities.

In Chinese, the word Cūn means village and community. It leads to a worldly life scenario that neighbours are supporting and sharing their life while keeping harmony and interdependent relationship with the natural environment. Situated in the inner city of Melbourne, CoCūn is a new model for accommodation for international students involved in design-related fields. The prefix co means "with", and in this project is used to reference a coalescence of features.

From co-living with roommates, co-existing with the natural environment; co-operation of programs and the connection between interior and exterior environments, this new living model intends to redefine the boundaries between program, space and activity. CoCūn is an alternative to the current profit-driven monotonous design style and decreases the sense of isolation and separation in current accommodation offerings. The student's mental status and well-being is at the forefront of this project. Harmony with nature is a Daoist concept in traditional Chinese architecture, and this project intends to practice this through the idea of Cūn (village) as a communal interior. By working with flexible programmatic arrangements and materialities, atmospheres transpire concerning hinges, apertures, thresholds, to produce a fluid interior, with permeability, with blurred boundaries between spaces and activities.

Each area in CoCūn is independent but also interconnected; it maximises the possibility of encounters between individuals and the surrounding environment while keeping a certain degree of privacy. Interior design has the power of influencing the psychological experience, and the pattern of behaviour of its users. CoCūn intends to enhance and make use of the positive impact of multiple modes of connections, to create encounters between people and their surrounding social and natural environments under this co-living circumstance. This project aims to encourage community interaction, thereby allowing for a sense of belonging and happiness.

Footscray is a western Melbourne suburb with a rich multicultural population.

Within Planning Victoria’s development policy, Footscray is labelled as a Metropolitan Activity Centre, with an anticipated doubling of the population over the next 20 years. This has prompted significant urban development over the last decade, particularly along the edge of the Maribyrnong River with the construction of several new high-rise apartment buildings.

This research project asks how community connections can be maintained and strengthened in the context of this rapidly increasing population and urban density. Using the currently under construction ‘Victoria Square’ as a case study, this project explores how the supplementary resident amenities and facilities that accompany this development may feed back into the urban environment and inform new connections with the extended community.

Through drawing, diagramming, collaging, and modelling, this research project has investigated how the significant changes within the streetscape impact the social dynamics and existing community culture of Footscray.

This project proposes a network of interventions integrated into the urban infrastructure, that choreograph and prompt moments of connection between people and the social and urban environment of Footscray. These interventions take the “luxury” amenity within Victoria Square as an influence; cinema, games room, gyms, sky gardens, outdoor Olympic track, and asks how these facilities can be translated into moments of connection and act as conjunctions for the community.

These proposed interventions aim to subtly speculate and suggest community connections by drawing out private amenity into a public realm. New urban interiors generate from these moments of social and urban connection and contribute to maintaining the strong community presence of Footscray.

I am intrigued by the natural landscapes as a situation where creativity and escape can transpire. Connected to Landscape is a research project that explores the qualities of the landscape concerning interior design and the dynamic between exterior and interior conditions.

The research considers interiors as a frame, can deeper connections to Landscape, community and creativity occur. The artist residency is in response to the growing need for artist spaces within regional and coastal towns. Situated within Painkalac Dam and surrounding heathland, on the edge of Aireys Inlet; a coastal town 120km south of Melbourne, this research proposes to expand upon the relationship between the community and the arts within Aireys Inlet. Aireys Inlet is a growing community, and there is a need for creative spaces to practice and exhibit.

The project considers the relationship between artist and subject and the need for the artist to be closer to their subject. Interiors are formed, orientated, and situated in relationship to the Landscape and its conditions to create a stronger connection. The role of the Landscape shifts from being a backdrop, through material arrangement and framing, which allows for practising and exhibiting to have a cohesive relationship with the environment. These act as scenic arrangements whilst supporting programmatic concerns of the residency.

Through techniques of framing, collaging, assemblage, photography and mapping, the qualities of the Landscape such as land, trees, water and sky are revealed, foregrounded and intensified. Framing is a way of bringing together through arrangement and shifting vicinities to develop connections with the Landscape and its conditions. Through the organization of materials, ephemera and program, the artist residency performs a way for sensations with the Landscape to be experienced in an intensified manner.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay respect to the Indigenous people of the Wathaurong Tribe where my project is sited and the people of the Wurundjeri Tribe where I am working from and to their Elders past, present and emerging.

In the west, we name the natural world ‘nature’, and so exclude ourselves from it. This exclusion causes a sense of disassociation from our innate place within the living world. This disassociation is a deep rooted issue within our current ecological crisis. It provoked my intrigue in re-evaluating the dominant and destructive view that humans are the most significant entities on the planet. This process based research aspires to rekindle an ecological curiosity and sensitivity. It is grounded in a relational style of thinking to advocate for more-than-human entities.

'Conversations of / with / in the Confluence' interrogates notions of monumentalising and the socio political potency associated. Traditionally monuments have been focused on the commemoration of someone or something that has lived in the past. They are deeply anthropocentric, predominantly colonial and are often fixed and static in their manifestation. This project ponders on who and what we monumentalise in our community culture, and experiments with how this can be done.

Through a series of site responsive projects I have engaged in gestures of monumentalisation of the Confluence of the Birrarung (Yarra River) and the Merri Creek of Naarm (Melbourne). This now heavily urbanised ecosystem is a junction of ecological networks, both human and more-than-human. Through techniques of framing and interiorisation I have engaged in digital and physical processes that respond to the temporality and sentience of the confluence and its layers of living history. This body of research practices collaboration to foster subjective but shared experiences around the site. This project is the emergence of an expanded spatial practice that can be applied to other urban interiors and communities. It can be measured as a form of gentle activism.

The suburban interior is both a space for performing and abiding everyday, sensible action and a dynamic site where neighbourhood drama plays out. Contained in this space are suburban ‘actors’, performing scripted behaviours aligned with societal norms. 


This project re-presents televised scenes from ‘Neighbours’ and locates these back in to the ‘real’ suburban space of Pin Oak Crescent in Vermont South, putting forward this alternate space as a set wherein neighbourliness and neighbourhood dynamics could unfurl. 

‘Neighbours’, set within the imagined bounds of Ramsey Street, Erinsborough and filmed within the ‘real’ Pin Oak Court in Melbourne’s Vermont South forms site – providing a display and representation of both suburban reality and un-reality.


Site supports notional design work, allowing for an opportunity to critique and re-present Suburban space and living practices. Using Play as a design tool for disrupting the status quo, or common ‘scenes’ of the Suburban interior, routine modes of action could give way to a new ‘Suburban Un-reality’. 


A re-presented scene from an episode of ‘Neighbours’, televised in 1989 has been placed back in to a ‘real’ suburban space of Vermont South and explores the relationship between ‘image’ (or representation) and reality. The reconstructed scene or ‘set’ poses as ‘real’ suburban space, filled with characters (or ‘actors’) who perform scripted roles and act out ‘neighbourliness’ together.


Further supporting this scene, ‘Junk mail’ is used as a way of ‘scripting’ or instructing on living in suburban space. The ‘junk’ aesthetic bleeds through into the material construction of the scene, as well as into the nature of the conversation and relationship between the ‘actors’ who occupy the space – holding a mirror up to the social, cultural and political knots that shape our way of living in suburban space, satirising patterns of materialism and consumerism that exist in suburbia.

Ecology Encounter explores concepts of sustainable tourism in a post–COVID context, and asks how the wanderlust of a tourist can be substituted in a travel restricted world. The project tests how site data, distance, tourist interaction and education can be experienced within gaming environments. Is it possible for gaming environments to simulate the tourist experience? How can a tourist absorb information and experience the enjoyment of a site when they cannot visit them physically? This project re-imagines physical spaces for a digital audience. It questions what information is lost and gained through this translation.

Ecology Encounter explores the durational experience of gaming and the potential it offers to draw on past, present, and future site information. Using the journey along the Great Ocean road as a case study site, this project develops a process of translating climate, geology, and geographical histories of the site into the gaming environment. Techniques explored include using psychical sketches to impart a human element, rendering images digitally to rake and mould data into something digestible and packaging it all together in an accessible gaming framework that offers both challenge and intrigue to the potential players.

I believe that information and data can serve many purposes including the creation of thought provoking digital objects, gaming interiors and heightened environmental awareness. Being able to harness and manipulate sets of complicated or obtuse data into something useful, informative and compelling, is, I believe, a worthy topic of investigation, even more so when it is displayed in a digital interior and rooted in an environmental framework.

The time of the pandemic in 2020 has changed our relationship to interior and exterior space. For me, extensive periods of isolation have resulted in a deep immersion in the transient ephemera of interiors and a disconnection from the outside world. At the same time, digital online space has become more important as a way of staying connected to others and ourselves. Through the framing of atmospheric phenomena and transition into the ambiguous digital realm, this body of work emphasises an attunement to the calming, overlooked qualities of interior space as a means to appreciate the benefits of this period of extended interiority.

This body of work builds on an archive of temporary installations developed throughout the year which evoke an attentiveness to ephemeral states as result of the interplay between the interior and exterior. In an attempt to slow down our engagement with the world, this work emphasises the contemplative and in certain moments, an experience that might be described as sublime.

Through the use of material-led explorations and digital mediums such as film and photography, this design research presents this experience of interior attunement through an online encounter to create a journey through the successive layers of virtual and actual interior and exterior spaces. This transitional experience is intended to emphasise an awareness of one’s own looking through moments of uncertainty, a dissolving of inside and outside and the actual and virtual.
This project may be understood as an archive of approaches; actual, virtual and combined, that have been developed as a response to this year of isolation. They are attunements to the quiet realm of the often overlooked as well as techniques or approaches to interior design, intended as an aid to those who like me have found themselves confined in order to see the true benefit of an extended period of reflection and contemplation.

Ever-Changing is a design for the Braybrook Community Hall utilising sunlight and artificial light to create dynamic interior experiences.

Technology has affected the way people live, spending most of their time working and socializing on screens such as smartphone and computer. This takes away their time for practicing self-care and interacting with the surrounding environment. Therefore, the project addresses this issue and uses lighting as a mean to positively impact personal and social well-being. The community centre design allows us to escape from stress of the digital world while helping us to maintain a balance between work and relaxation in our daily lives.

The lighting effect is produced using custom prisms that transform ordinary sunlight into rainbow beams, bathing the community hall in colour. The rainbow is a beautiful phenomenon of nature and sacred symbol of happiness, peace and redemption. By utilising the suns path during the day, a living rainbow of natural light, combined with artificial lighting, gradually shifts with the daily routine and programming of the space. The living rainbow changes in intensity, colour and shape every hour, every day and every season – to encourage people to engage in different activities such as leisure, exercise, cooking, befriending, art and craft.

Feel Free to go and comeback, I’ll be here is a curated process that interrogates relational interior design. The process aims to reframe everyday familiar space and the way it is encountered and designed. This requires interaction from participants who become collaborators, contributing to both production of different knowledges as well the unlearning of existing codified interiors.

The development the design process has come from others and my own material testing as well as application of theoretical ideas of unlearning and concepts of interiority. The process tests take “forms” such of organisation, sculpture, music, performance as well as conceptual changes in daily patterns. The program requires “participants” to choose from designed roles which provide ephemeral and spatial prompts. The roles are there to encourage creative interaction with their physical surroundings.

Feel Free to go and comeback, I’ll be here, is dynamic and occupies conceptual space which seeks to later manifest into changes of rhythms which challenge complacency in physical space. This epistemological approach considers the root cause of the production of one's own interior as well as social space, curating a body of work that unpacks the existing cultural production of multiple individuals within different communities.

The practice carefully considers and aims to promote radicality in Interior Design through the process unlearning, and to encourage discourse that reconsiders the existing understanding of its values. The proposition thus takes the form of subtraction of existing knowledge based on the current spatial rhythms forced onto bodies by a capitalistic state. Making room for new differences, now.

The question of ‘where does my food comes from?’ is one of important relevance in today’s society. Through transparency in production methodologies, the at times mysterious side to farming is now becoming an important dictator in enabling people to make informed decisions about where and who they purchase and consume food from. This research focuses on the construction of informative narratives within a hospitality setting, that aim to develop a relationship between people and the agricultural spaces and processes that produce their food.

Framework endeavours to construct a series of narratives using a former Drill hall built in 1912, as a case study. The open span shed structure is situated on the threshold between a regional centre and agricultural land in Warragul, Victoria. Through research into farming practices and the spatial systems observed in agriculture, I developed strategies for designing a hospitality interior within this site. The restaurant occupies both the existing interior of the drill hall and pushes out into the surrounding land.

Framework speculates on the possibilities of overlapping and intersecting the interior and exterior systems of eating and agriculture. The consideration of agricultural production serving not just as an adjunct, but instead a formative element within the hospitality interior, has the potential to provide insight into the sites and processes that lead to the food on the plate. Through creating interior spaces that are embedded with agricultural narratives, this project aims to give rise to moments of understanding and engagement, and create an interface between the community and the farmers producing their food.

GEN NOW GEN TOMORROW extends my ongoing investigation of permanently provisional approaches to interior design, an exploration of how human and interior environments respond to the ever-changing conditions through modular systems. This practice based research interrogates residential design as a living system that defies duration, and nurtures symbiotic relationships within a multi-generation family. I drew upon vernacular design in Cambodia, through user, site, structure and sensory responsive to create a system of adaptation that responds to high density living arrangements.

The project draws from culture, traditions, conditions, and documented complex social impacts of childcare and elderly homes to encourage co-living. GEN NOW, GEN TOMORROW proposes an inter-generation system that emphasize collectivism shaped by experience, identity and culture. As a conceptual structure, the living system facilitates and sustains the body, space and environment, and within that life, longevity and connection. GEN NOW, GEN TOMORROW works with the existing conditions of past and present generations to inform the future interior of generation alpha and beyond.

The digital native of 2020 has grown up surrounded by technology and immersed in gaming culture. In a way, gamers frequently teleport their consciousnesses to inhabit and traverse diverse virtual interiors. However, while virtual space provides a place for people to gather for entertainment and social connection, paradoxically loneliness and depression are still rife in online space, as with behaviours such as exclusion and harassment.

Good Game addresses the growing need for mechanisms that reconnect gamers with “real life” social connection in this rapidly growing virtual community, by developing new modes in which some positive elements of gaming and virtual community can be drawn on. Have the unchecked agencies afforded by online gaming – and associated social platforms such as Discord[1] and Twitch[2] – desensitised us to the repercussions of toxic online behaviour on others’ wellbeing?

Good Game proposes a new relational interior that functions as a hybrid space that bridges the gap between gamers’ perception of online and offline reality. The proposal integrates with Discord inviting participants to connect IRL, in a programmed series of community-and game-driven ventures.

By providing gamers with a framework to build a community that resonates between virtual and real, Good Game intends to encourage a more inclusive social interior for young gamers both online and offline.

[1] An online social platform that allows gamers to communicate via voice/video comms and to share digital content

[2] A live-streaming site that is predominantly used by gamers to stream in-game content to public viewers

This research project is born out of a deep concern for the ongoing destruction of the environment and driven by a desire to establish a regenerative practice of interior design. The year 2020 has forced the questioning of the status quo and in response, Groundwork prompts questions that tilt perspectives of the familiar and habitual. The project is based on a private property outside Trentham, Victoria, acting as a testing ground for the research. Groundwork aims to address the all too often ignored impact colonisation has had on this land, through a literal untangling of the thorns. Focusing on the introduced invasive species of blackberry, an ongoing cyclical program of proposed events creates the framework for temporal interiors, while addressing the issue of land management and collective responsibility. The events respond to the growth cycle of the blackberry plant, organically developing and evolving over time. The gradual removal of the blackberries and replanting of native species establishes a management plan that invites others to participate in educational programs and harvest days, providing space for collective experience. A dynamic symbiotic relationship occurs between the program and the natural environment – changes are echoed between the two and a deep seeded rapport emerges. This project positions interior design as a practice of interrelations between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – between interiority and exteriority. It explores the proposition that as humans, we are inextricably linked to the exterior – we are a state-of-nature. But our experience of it is mediated through the projection of our ‘interior’ out, and also, the ‘exterior’ in. To understand the value of the exterior world, and shape it sustainably and cohesively, we must rethink our own interior values and relationship to the planet. This project lays the groundwork for a future practice; a novel intrusion that is considerate of land, material, and connection with others.

On the driest continent on earth, what could be more precious than fresh water…?

In an era defined by human driven climate change there is urgency that we address our impact on the earths ability to regulate. Healthy natural environments are a prime reflection of climatic balance, yet our radically urbanised way of life has severed us from this intrinsic comprehension. From our domestic interiors we exploit land daily with no apparent consequence to inform us of our effect.

H2OME is a design project that interrogates the consumers relationship with water in an existing home. It seeks to promote mindful consumption of this essential resource by connecting users to the complexities of its origin.

Consumed frequently within this site water appears via the simple turn of a tap. We often only associate it with the domestic tasks at hand and quickly discard of it despite the extensive journey. Its fleeting presence brings with it wastefulness and lack of opportunity to question where it came from, where it is going and how we might be degrading its quality.

In challenging the infrastructural systems that service us with the delivery and disposal of water, this project aims to expose consumers to the natural processes otherwise hidden to them. Enacting a systems-thinking approach to utilising water within the home the reconfigured dwelling foregrounds a gravitational purifier with consumers integral to its activation at every stage.

If devoted to the system a series of rewards emerge that embrace moments within nature where water is the essence of life. This seeks to depict an interlinked ecology reflective of natural terrains on an intimate scale. Through this process of engagement with a system the consumer turns carer of water and it is hoped, develops a greater awareness of its vitality.

Home – more than a house is a research project seeking to understand the notion of home through a sense of belonging. My curiosity started as a personal inquiry into the meaning of a home, being with home and being at home. My current understanding of 'home' is as time, space and imagination that carries individual memories and hopes for the future. It is also a site that can accentuate connections between people. I therefore pose the question, how can interior design promote qualities of home and belonging – outside the context of the house – to create spaces for sharing and exchange between diverse cultures?

This design project seeks to establish a sense of ‘home’ outside of the house for fostering the celebration of diverse cultures within a community. Studies show that cultural celebration is particularly important for people displaced from their original homes through migration. This project focuses on the large and diverse population of people who have immigrated to Melbourne. Naturally we have a need to belong to the people around us and to be able to meaningfully contribute our local community. It is this need for cultural expression that this design project hopes to establish through the design of a restaurant.

The design centres around food as a means to bring a people together but also as a way to establish a shared ‘home’ and sense of belonging. Rather than a traditional hospitality model of patrons and service staff this restaurant seeks to involve everyone in the process. From arranging tables, preparing and cooking food, serving and eating together each stage of the meal creates opportunities for appreciating and celebrating cultural difference.

In today’s contemporary cities and too often in urban centres, we are controlled by our day to day activities, thus closing off specific urban experiences that exist around us. We move back and forth between various locations with a clear purpose but lack the abilities to explore. How do we reconnect urban experiences with people and how do we construct a walking journey where people can move between the streets with a sense of exploration.

This major project “Homo Ludens” takes the ideals of psychogeography, and emphasises a playful and dérive negotiation of the urban interior. It explores the potential of sensory design to ask people to look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences. The designed interventions constantly change in response to the surroundings to create a sense of “unfamiliar” with the urban interior. It tries to nudge those people who are in this repetitive cycle of urban living to allow the emotional and subjectivities of random behaviours to enter their urban experiences, merging with existing fabrics and infrastructures of Melbourne city.

Homo Ludens responds to specific and temporal urban interior conditions; waterflow, airflow and sunlight, and interacting with existing infrastructures on the city’s sidewalks. These interventions utilise and propose new visual and auditory experiences, manipulating different materials to reshape people’s recognition of the city in an exploratory and immersive way.

Consumption of social media is at an all-time high, and has become an essential form of interaction, especially during COVID. Social media has become a way to escape the everyday; its routines, moments and encounters that over time become repetitive and mundane.

However, at the tip of our fingers, we all can now filter and represent our lives to make them more appealing to the world of social media. Photos are curated, using filters or pre-sets, to achieve the "perfect" feed. The everyday has become a set for Instagram, and Instagram has become a stage for everyday life. The real everyday has been altered to fit a specific image of what the perfect Instagram user or feed looks like. This approach not only affects the authenticity of what people post but also how people conduct their everyday lives.

This body of work is not anti-social media – actually quite the opposite, embracing this new reality becoming both a fan and skeptic. It is a provocation to live your most authentic life through the use of social media.

This project uses the space of the home, that was once private but now public, once interior, now folded into the gaze of social media.

‘How to live your most authentic life’ conflates techniques used in set design; framing, staging, filtering and cropping in order to create a speculative approach to the apparently effortless ‘instagrammable’ house. Interior spaces become a backdrop for these everyday moments which have been specifically curated using techniques of conflation and juxtaposition, in order to create humorous, ironic and occasionally disturbing encounters. The work will look at how different identities occupy the space of the home varying for each individual. The project celebrates the less ‘instagrammable’ everyday moments we partake in.

In the current era, people are increasingly dependent on technology and virtual space, which leads to a state of profound alienation between humans and the natural environment. This has diminished people's perception of the interconnection between the external natural environment and the interior. Our present society's pursuit of material things combined with the encroachment of technology into every aspect of our lives leads directly to the disappearance of nature which provides a space for gratitude and a space for people to think about meaning and value.

Under the influence of COVID-19 these tendencies have been exacerbated. The design project attempts to address this issue asking: how may we design interior spaces so that people can experience the restorative wonders of nature, as well as the changes of time, season and weather while working or living indoors?

I have applied these ideas to the context of the workspace where I believe they are most needed. I have designed a system for a top floor office site as a model for future workplaces. The proposed design opens this working space to the dynamic variation of the natural environment. It transforms the existing systems in this scenario (such as lighting, drainage system, exhaust system, etc.) by opening them to the fluctuations of the natural elements so that people can feel the presence of nature while working.

The purpose of this project has been to integrate the indoor and outdoor as much as possible so individuals can feel the natural elements of light, water and wind and the changes of weather whilst continuing to work inside. Ultimately this is to provide a reimagined relationship between the interior and the exterior within the office workspace so as to transform the experience of working and confinement indoors.

[IN]BODIED positions the interior in relation to the body, suggesting that the interior is activated by the presence of the body and manifests itself through the physical occupation of space. Situated within the context of 2020 and the natural slowing down that has occurred during isolation, this project investigates the natural choreography of the body in our everyday rituals and routines. The project initiates a generative design process through the repetitive and ceremonial sequence of actions we perform daily in our households. Through these everyday routines, the work attempts to extract the performance of our domestic existence.

[IN]BODIED proposes a series of temporary sets within public spaces bounded by the 25km radius of Metropolitan Melbourne. These temporary sets provide a platform for the performance of domestic rituals, publishing and performing our private interiors. The proposed series of sets and their accompanying performances address the shift in the arts industry in a post-COVID landscape.

The project questions how the experience of performance and dance might be integrated into our urban landscape. A series of events over a week have been choreographed and performed, converting public spaces into temporary theatres, activating a fleeting immersive interior. Each set transforms in conjunction to the movement of the dancers, the motion is repetitive and circular as a means to communicate the mundanities of what we have been experiencing. They attempt to shed light, collectively bringing people together while apart and foster a platform for performance. The performances become temporal monuments to 2020.

The act of waiting is part of our everyday and a derivative of the service offering in the hospitality industry. In our society and culture, which prioritises the value of productivity, waiting is often seen as a passive moment of doing nothing. Waiting is experienced differently, often both positively and negatively.

The current climate of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a slowness to our pace of life. It has enhanced this transient moment of time, with the observation of social distancing and limitation of capacities within venues. This has created a shift in our experience of hospitality. This project is situated within the commercial context to bridge our social experiences and re-imagine our lives adapting to this new normal.

Degraves Street through to Centre Place is a key part of Melbourne’s hospitality experience. The cafes, restaurants, and shops which line the laneway, fill it with the bustling of life. The project aims to re-activate this iconic laneway through the design of a façade system that intervenes into the thresholds and storefronts of its existing hospitality venues. It seeks to explore the transitional spaces of waiting between the interior and exterior, prompting the question: how can spatial interventions facilitate the act of waiting in our everyday?

The design of the façade system explores the concept of a kit-of-parts through joinery design and materiality. With a primary focus on takeaway services, this series of hinged panels pushes in and out of the stores, expanding the densely populated and narrow laneway. It aims to respond to the nature of the site and explore the notion of waiting through its nuanced details. Thus, it creates an opportunity for unprescribed experiences to occur, offering a narrative of the in—between.

Nationally, the demand for mental health care continues to outstrip supply, with it being reported that depression now constitutes the second largest cause of disability in Australia. If the ultimate form of wealth is our health, why does it so often fall short in comparison to career or money as the ultimate providers of happiness?

Situated in context of the Alfred Hospital’s existing mental health facilities, Journey to w[Health] is an investigation that seeks to place health as its top priority, while exploring the benefits of horticultural therapy as an alternative treatment for mental health in the hospital’s surrounding green spaces. Since the mid-1990s, there has been an increasing emphasis on patient-centred design and a growing understanding of the importance of incorporating high-quality garden areas within our physical environments. As such, this project proposes a series of annex treatment spaces, inspired by the three parklands they reside in – Fawkner Park, Victoria Gardens and Alma Park – intended to extend the benefits of the hospital, and reshape the way in which a mental health treatment site could function in the future.

By addressing the rising demand for mental health services in Melbourne, this project will propose a series of therapeutic garden-led structures situated on areas of parkland rundown by everyday use. Through the insertion of fluid walls, the definition of private and semi-public environments will be questioned and the ways in which an ‘inter-space’* can be used to lend itself to horticultural activity. Intended as a hub of learning, exchange and activity, treatment within these ‘walls’ become about a patient’s experience with their internal and external world, combined with new capabilities to restore areas of public space, and in turn seek transformation towards a more sustainable future of health.

• Inter-space: relating to the zone in which the interior merges with the external environment.

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has left people all over the world in a state of panic and anxiety. As COVID-19 patients were quarantined, how will the state of isolation affect their physical and mental health? Isolation resists the virus, at the same time, it deprives close contact with families and the outside world. It makes people deeply aware of the pain, helplessness, fear and loneliness of being hospitalized. For sick children, these negative emotions and insecurities were risen and couldn’t be overlooked.

Keep [In] Touch is an idea and research-led interior design project, contextualised living and health-care for sick children. The project aims to provide a positive and comfortable living and healing experiences for children who were hospitalised. It helps to reduce the feeling of fear and re-instate their joyfulness and freedom. This project specifically focuses on the aspect of spatial and temporal design of the hospital lobby, lounge areas and movable wards.

The project started with research into the concept and qualities of the womb. The womb is the first place everyone lives in; we are enveloped, but we can hear, touch, feel and move. Based on the qualities of the womb, a series of explorations were carried out.

Scenography is used as a design tool and technique, to create a womb-like atmosphere that people could actively interact with. The research question arises: How can the technique of scenography be applied in the context of healthcare to provide positive living and therapeutic experiences for sick children? This research explores the integration of living, play, daylight and indigenous greenery through investigating specific apertures, site lines and new connections of space. Moreover, the sensation of sight, touch, sound and smell of natural elements were also investigated to contribute for sick children’s recovery, through interactive interior design elements.

Light X Change explores how the effect of sharing light on humans could make changes in community both at the local and global level. Under the disconnection during the COVID-19, I take my own experience of apartment living in which light is unequally distributed and ask what if this intangible resource could be shared and became a new means for physical and mental connection with one another during and after the pandemic?

The research project uses the idea of “sharing light” as a metaphor, employing the idea of light sharing to consider new ways of relinking the broken relationships of neighbourhood, community and economy. Sharing light may be understood as a means to transform community and open pathways to economic repair.

The project imagines radical changes to community living systems and then asks how distributing light – which is now a viable renewable energy source – could contribute to the sharing economy that is emerging at the time of climate crisis and economic stagnation. Lighting through the use of optical fibre, the project is divided into three phases, demonstrating how light-sharing driven spaces could affect behaviour and enhance a sense of community now, and in the near and distant future. Alongside imagining if apartment buildings generated their own light and returned this energy to the new digitised energy internet and how might this wealth be shared.

The world is facing the challenge of rapid urbanisation. To meet the demands of an increasing population, some residential buildings are being built without consideration of the social and environmental impacts they have. Poorly considered floor plan layouts that squeeze as many rooms as possible to maximise profit have a negative affect on thermal qualities and therefore impact on the residents. Moreover, in the era of rapid technology development, people spend more than 90 per cent of their lives indoors without connecting to the natural environment which can lead to physical and mental health problems.

Co-living system: Living facade is a design for an urban site that considers community, affordability, sustainability, public amenity and innovative facade design for a new generation of suburbanites. The concept of co-living has been introduced as a strategic tool to combat the declining interaction of suburban dwellers. This type of housing seeks residents with shared interests and values to live together like an extended family.

The building facade and apertures are vital in this project as they play a critical role in connecting internal and external social spaces. The facade also impacts on the quality of the indoor environment through light and ventilation. The operable facade allows engagement with various activities and programs which see residential spaces connected and part of collective experience. The design intends to coax residents out of traditionally delineated bounds of their homes to spend more time in communal areas interacting with others.

An interrogation of spatial connectivity between interior and exterior, private and shared, is key to this design proposal and in producing friendly and socially meaningful communities. This is my hope for the future of our urban homes.

The current pandemic introduces regulations limiting social interaction and physical mobility. Due to the lack of exterior stimulation, this has heightened our spatial awareness and appreciation for our immediate surroundings. In response to this new reality, my major project addresses the question: what role can design play in constructing models of sociability whilst adhering to the new guidelines of physical distancing?

Located in Ruffey Lake Park, the project explores the opportunities present within a free public space. Parks are both a social and collective space for public interactions, yet due to the pandemic, moments which previously fostered interaction have been seriously impacted.

The interventions developed for ‘Look:See’ draw members of the public to spaces and moments often overlooked in Ruffey Lake Park. This project draws on techniques of video and photography that document the transient conditions apparent in nature. Interventions are developed from an archive of video and photographic approaches that explore ways of looking. The process of framing through these methods prompts us to reconsider how we see and respond to a space. Through various techniques of framing, micro spaces are magnified, creating a visual connection between the interior and exterior. This blurring of boundaries fabricates an experience of interiority within the public realm. These interventions choreograph encounters that enhance a bodily and introspective experience with various spaces in order to prompt social interactions.

This collection of work emphasises processes of duration to produce moments of interiority. The project choreographs possible journeys, stations and encounters throughout the park landscape to draw attention to alternative ways of seeing elements of ephemerality and permanence.

The work ultimately address two questions. How can design contribute or address this new complex social condition produced by the pandemic? How can moments of introspection and contemplation be initiated through bodily encounters within a public space to form moments of inter-human relations?

Materiality shapes the spaces we inhabit, and often subtle qualities of materials produce fleeting interactions and experiences. The research questions how material qualities can activate and shift an experience or encounter within an environment that has visible and invisible conditions. The research explores and responds to material through intervening with material to incite activation, framing and interaction. The research explores how tactics in stimulating materials can produce an experience with materiality.

The research project explores a range of materials in relationship to light and sound as a way of materialising subtle conditions and the immaterial qualities often unnoticed. The research considers materials as a medium of space which can hold information and narratives. Through a series of material gestures that incite materialisation of conditions, such as lighting and acoustics a shift in awareness occurs through environmental conditions interacting with materials, the project explores how materials become mediums and interfaces for past and present narratives and therefore influence an experience within the site.

Materialised Interactions is a suite of interventions located in the site of Eagles Nest bunker, within the Point Nepean National Park. It involves a series of material gestures which involve amplifying sound and light qualities within the bunkers many cavities and tunnels and openings. Through a series of framing techniques where materials are introduced, and responded to, based on their material properties and juxtaposed dynamics to intensify a narrative and alter the journey through the bunkers. This project is an assemblage of materialities and narratives as it responds to existing conditions which are re-presented back into the site to draw out the past histories coalesced with existing conditions.

A study in memory, set within the framework of the childhood home, specifically my own, MemoryForm poses the question: how does a space inform memory? And in turn, how does memory inform space?

Exploring the relationships formed between an individual and the home in which they grew up, and the way in which these dynamics change over time, this project situates itself simultaneously within the past, present and future.

The work that has been produced throughout this project is intrinsically personal and has been filtered through the lens of my own emotions and attachments. It explores the way in which a space is inhabited, first by an individual and then by the presence of their memories, asking the question: what happens to a home after we leave it?

As my work has developed, I have started to more deeply understand my own connections to my home, viewing the space through both my past memories and the current moments which will become memories. This has led me to consider my home to be an archaeological excavation site within which I have staged works of intervention and installation that, through the use of photography, film and projection explore the act of remembering and the format of memory itself.

As such, MemoryForm is an exploration of techniques and mediums which can be used to capture time and hold memory, in turn investigating ideas of trace, decay, attachment and detachment.

Co-living has the potential to challenge conventional residential typologies and open up new possibilities for ways of living. Growing numbers of people now work remotely, and this provides an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of domestic living and home. Re-imagining futures where home is not a fixed place, but something that moves with you.

Migrate to a SOJOURN! located in a row of harbourside houses of Mallorca island, Spain. Based on a propositional ‘global accommodation network’ scenario, residents will have longer living experiences forming 'temporary families'. This nomadic co-living paradigm targets 'digital nomads' and people who do not depend on a fixed place, encouraging groups of people with similar interests and values to live together and build new long-lasting relationships.

Furniture is used as a conceptual driver of the design, through a range of ritual experiments, sketches and physical modelling a ‘co-furnishing strategy’ was developed. The flexible furniture pieces encourage collaboration and work together in the shared space that adapts to everyday living and flexible for a variety of community scenarios for residents to connect and engage with the locals.

The social potential of redefining blurred boundaries of the dwelling and shared living environments heightens flexibility in communal life, providing a new way of living that speculates on future possibilities in residential design.

At an aged care home, material and immaterial boundaries each create obstacles for social interactions. This design research project seeks to minimise these social barriers for residents of an aged care facility to foster connections that enhance emotional wellbeing. Research reveals that living in a social environment is essential for well-being.

The question posed is; how can we design communal spaces in aged care to encourage the residents to foster relationships and interact?

This design project is situated in an existing aged care home to explore ways of forming better social connections during daily activities. Different strategies have been employed to remove the spatial constraints that restrict a resident’s mobility and ability to connect. By reconfiguring the spatial layouts I have opened up a discussion on the model of care and social connections in aged care. Game spaces have been designed through the use of way-finding, thresholds and extending structural boundaries to help encourage people to come together. Speculative design techniques and perspective drawings were used to find meeting points and zoned divisions for social interactions. The diagrams portray thresholds at the site and are superimposed to support distant and close interactions.

Close social interactions emerge from layering materials and surface encounters that perform in the communal space to lessen the physical and social barriers faced by residents. Playing games is an important aspect of living well and helps the older generation to form friendships within aged care facilities.

As a result, I designed a framework that offers adaptable activity spaces created through the use of materials and new technologies that identify ways of reducing the effects of physical and emotional barriers to facilitate friendships in aged care homes.

Cities are facing an unprecedented set of challenges that demand new strategies to tackle a growing population, increased social segregation, environmental decline, housing shortage and overrun infrastructure. With a precarious future looming this research project inquiries into whether cities could address social, cultural, and environmental issues by being more communal.

The division caused by borders and boundaries have been greatly emphasised in response to the Covid-19 pandemic which has further contributed to the social segregation of our society. The research question asks, can an active negotiation of boundaries and territories develop a more connected community?

A design intervention is proposed at the state border between the two cities Albury in NSW and Wodonga in Victoria. The border is defined by the natural flow of the Murray River but is now a hard delineation affecting the ability for exchange and negotiation between the cities.

To dismantle the rigidity of the boundary and create an opportunity for exchanges to occur between the residents of both cities, a proposal of an open adaptable system of floating structures change people's relationship with the river through new modes of interaction.

Seasonal variations are marked by fluctuations in the waterline which requires different programs and events to have to negotiate and adapt to the different site conditions and user groups. By being part of the surrounding ecosystem links the proposal to the land and water. This encourages reciprocity between the two communities.

Through a process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation combined with the need to respond to the ephemeral conditions, facilitates a strengthening of these connections. By fostering a greater connection between these communities and the ecology to the natural environment it is hoped to bring about a more resilient network that could go beyond the site to impact our cities making them more communal.

This research explores how historical and contemporary spaces can be programmed together to facilitate new urban interiors. The creative research practice involved techniques such as collage, diagramming, material arrangement, and digital media. The research considers interiors as the dynamic integration between people and sites, in time.

This research is situated in Melbourne, which has long been one of Australia's most innovative cities. With the rapid development of the economy, much contemporary construction is taking place, and slowly, the historical spaces of Melbourne fall into the background.

This major project challenges the convention of a monument being static, by exploring monumentalizing being dynamic and integrated within the urban interior. The project studies the ‘dérive’ (Debord, 1956), which is an unplanned journey through an urban interior, where participants let themselves be drawn to and by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

Elizabeth Street, one of the busiest streets in Melbourne's CBD, is now packed with retail and hospitality venues. However, only few people know that there is a natural creek called Williams Creek running under the concrete. It flows along (underneath) Elizabeth Street, goes under Flinders Station, and empties into the Yarra River (Birrarung). The final design aims to reinstate the original creek by excavating Elizabeth Street and creating a new urban promenade.

According to the City of Melbourne’s Tourist Administration, the number of tourists from overseas has dramatically increased in the past twenty years. This year COVID-19 has seen Melbourne in lockdown for a good part of 2020 and has seen a dramatic decrease in tourism. Due to this, many local businesses have seen a huge economic impact. Swanston Street, in the heart of Melbourne, is usually bustling with tourists and locals alike, and currently it is empty of people enjoying all that it offers. This Major Project imagines life after COVID-19 and uses Swanston Street as site for activation to re-invigorate the city and provide new experiences for tourists and the locals of Melbourne.

This Major Project began with the research question, how can digital and spatial technologies be used to create urban interventions that provide a better experience for visiting Melbourne? Through this research, it has been established that Swanston Street has a variety of usages including, commercial, hospitality, multicultural, transportation and arts programs and communities. Through specific interventions, the design facilitates visitors to further understand the history and contemporary contexts, and their changes, in the city of Melbourne. Concurrently, these interventions act as a guide for visitors to Melbourne’s CBD.

This Major Project allows a new experience for visitors to the interventions by challenging the relations of space and time. Furthermore, these interventions act as real-time memorials; a historical and contemporary recording that is ever evolving and accessible to those who cannot be physically present.

A home contains and houses rich memories owned by the lives of its inhabitant’s past, present and future. A building and or interior is a vessel for these memories. Our Home 2.0 is a memory led investigative project into the social issues and impacts surrounding the redevelopments of public housing estates within the Melbourne precinct closely exploring the Bangs Street Estate’s past and future through design interventions that facilitate healthy social interactions between residents.

The Bangs Street Redevelopment within the PHPDP (Public Housing Precinct Development Plan) is one of four social housing estates within Prahran anticipating redevelopment. As the majority of public housing buildings within Victoria and nationwide originate from post-war modern architecture, the aging process of these structures are beginning to surface in the contemporary world resulting in the need for urgent and quite frequent repairs and restoration. The site is dilapidated and breaking down after the displacement of tenants in 2017. Presently, the site is activated through demolition processes to begin the PHPDP. Projecting forward into the future outcome of the site, the PHPDP will provide 175 new co-housing dwellings including some small retail and public spaces within and surrounding.

While co-housing can provide a solution to social housing, this project investigates specifically the sites foyer and how the space can program and facilitate healthy and social interactions amongst new tenants within the public and private context. An exploration into ideas of how memory of the previous sites architecture and tenant experience can be used as a design tool to better understand the human experience and inform the space providing a rich interactive and immersive environment while paying homage to the past site and residents.

Practise [in] Listening is the product of an in-depth investigation into sound, deep listening and attentiveness. An extensive exploration into quotidian auditory encounters, and the ways in which these moments are observed, denoted and intensified, presented revitalised conversation around the notion of interiority.

Through processes of text-based research, interventions, site-responses and filmic techniques, this body of work moves intuitively to translate and communicate the transient sonic encounters that come together temporarily creating interiors. In the secondary phase of exploration, this major research project is particularly concerned with the potency of sound as a tool to connect individuals and communities, and to facilitate experiences of interiority.

Practise [in] Listening is a twelve-month symposium of sound, hosting a series of talks, installations, performances and workshops, exploring deep listening, sound, wellness and silence.

This program is supported by a series of soft infrastructures which are activated temporarily in now vacant, commercial space within Melbourne’s Central Business District. The tactile interiors provisionally intervene into each site for the specific purpose of each sound event, and are just as quickly extracted, leaving behind no trace.

Furthermore, the symposium opens up a greater discussion around the value of sound and deep listening in the context of interior design.

The in-between is intermediate in its being and indeterminate in its becoming. It occupies a temporary moment in time; bookended by past conditions and future potentialities. By understanding the in-between in this way – as a largely fragmented halfway field – processes of flux and states of suspense are alluded to.

Practising Between is a process-driven research inquiry interrogating the designer’s role in analysing and documenting existing conditions of sites in temporal states of vacancy. These sites in flux operate as microcosms for larger issues around value and preservation amidst capitalist forces when interiors enter a state of dilapidation and derelict. A State Savings Bank, dilapidated mansion in Toorak, and vacant portion of land scattered with remains of a recently demolished dwelling are the focus of this inquiry. The interlacing thread weaving commonality between these sites is they collectively occupy a state of betweenness; a moment in time bracketed by what they once where; halted on their way to becoming something else. The project speculates; how can working with fragments from existing sites that occupy a state of betweenness be interrogated to craft or restore value?

Practising Between is situated amidst processes of archiving, re-presentation and encounter within the context of the post-internet era. The project comprises a series of embodied site-specific responses offering a commentary on the potential value a designer can access while working with fragments of the existing. This spatial dialogue is manifested through iterative processes of assemblage, film and digital exhibition. The overarching intent for working with these mediums is to apprehend the historical, spatial, temporal and immaterial conditions of each site; so they can be immortalised and re-encountered. The project culminates in an online exhibition compiling the various responsive gestures and operates as an emergent archive and autonomous place of encounter; where the interface and navigation of the website is designed in parallel with the ideas that surfaced through the practising.

Heritage buildings are at risk of being demolished for today’s constant need for development. Existing and dilapidated structures are left unconsidered as opportunities for activation. Is it necessary to destroy heritage buildings to accommodate contemporary additions? Is restoration the way forward? Can we implement something as subjective as value to dictate demolition, restoration and adaption?

The research project explores topics of destruction and decay, authenticity and imitation, as well as adaptation and connection. These explorations have influenced the direction in which the research has taken shape, ultimately leading towards ideas of how a site can be preserved through adaptation, with a focus on how the old and the new can meet.

Collage has become a recurring technology connecting images from varying locations, situations and times. These new configurations allow for an adapted narrative to dictate a relationship between heritage and contemporary elements and to not stand as mutually exclusive interiors. Contemporary elements can highlight and enhance the details of the heritage. Marrying these offers a connection between past, present and future.

At present we are facing a pandemic and with this comes uncertain times and economic struggles. A vast majority of the hospitality industry has been in strain due to government restrictions and the change of values of usual customers. Many have adapted to these uncertain times by creating flexible spaces and offerings to cater for the audience and their newfound slow pace. The site of this project is the Flinders Street Station Ballroom – a dilapidated site that has not been open to the public since 1983 but is a hidden treasure due to its iconic location, rich history and ornamental architectural features. This research project aims to activate the Ballroom by introducing the program of a food hall to reunite the community and hospitality industry after a long period of isolation, and to celebrate the building, the city and its businesses.

This research has explored ideas of material affordance. It asks whether materials can foster connections between people and place?

Re-frame, Re-purpose, Re-vitalize explores the way we live, work, and play in the Urban Interior. The design addresses the institutional and social contexts of a University by revitalizing an under-used service laneway. Left un-programmed, the design seeks to unite the existing and introduced material palette to afford a multiplicity of spaces to gather, relax, and escape. Through strategies of filtering, layering, framing and connecting views the condition of a threshold subtly shifts the possible uses through the affordance of the materiality. From these associations with the existing materiality, new possibilities arise from the site.

Valuing the importance of ‘Third Space’ the design seeks to create possibilities that avoid program but constantly shift association to allow for new connections between people and place. The laneway is activated by borrowing the existing material backdrops and built elements of the site to form interiors on different platforms and levels. Using the established language of the site —which is so material rich and layered— affordances are created that invite new forms of interaction. The platforms both support and heighten social encounters while being adaptable to the user.

Re-frame, Re-purpose, Re-vitalize, seeks to redefine multifunctional and adaptable spaces by re-associating perceived boundaries through material affordances.

Due to Coronavirus (COVID-19), Melbourne currently faces lockdown laws imposed by the Victorian government, restricting the public from their usual day-to-day activities. As a result, the retail sector faces a serious financial fallout, causing the closure of many retail spaces. If the issue of COVID-19 continues, a lot of retail spaces will become empty; this has huge negative impacts but has immense spatial and temporal potential. In addition to the growing population, there is an increase of urbanization and scarcity of specific resources in Melbourne.

Therefore, as interior designers, we need to rethink the way in how we live, to reuse existing infrastructures and materials, to interact and produce potentials within these unused retail spaces. This Major Project enhances the future of wellbeing through designing our city into a more sustainable urban space.

The project ‘Regrowth’ intends to create a series of ‘grey space’s within Chadstone shopping centre, creating a series of thresholds between urban interiors and natural environments. Through the composition of industrial and natural elements, Chadstone is redesigned into an internal eco-forest which provides new potential uses of the site. These include an aquaponics farm, seasonal interior gardens, and external social areas and shared spaces, that target the communities of people who live around the Chadstone shopping centre.

[Re]petition uses Melbourne's Living Museum of the West as a testing site, to propose new way of presenting their archive collection, providing flexible interactive spaces for visitors and co-working spaces for the museum staff. [Re]petition recognizes interior conditions on a durational timeline that unfold the past and present condition to speculate possible futures.

[Re]petition takes three different approaches to different histories of the site. Acknowledging the First Nations culture, the Marin Balluk, part of the Wurunjeri people, members of the Kulin nations drawing their close relationship with the environment, to tell the stories of the past frame a relationship with the land through a de-colonized approach to interior design. [Re]petition strives to bring outside-in to weaken the boundary of interior and exterior reflecting pre-colonial experiences of living with country. In doing this, the design secondly dilutes the industrial near-past of the site, developing ways to bring changes in interior experience as a living history that unfolds though participation.

Finally, the project also challenges us to see the present program of the archive/museum as not just as preserving objects and stories in the past to maintain in stillness but allowing them to ‘grow’ with participants, and unfold in the spaces themselves growing narratives that impact the present.

[Re]petition is driven by an interest in duration within interior experiences through everyday repetitive activities and actions. [Re]petition underpins theory from Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition of the new is produced from every difference in repetition. [1] Through research and exploration [Re]petitive investigates what is ‘the new’ in the process of repeating, and what are the traces of actions that emerges when encountering space. [Re]petition proposes that interior conditions be able to facilitate built-in-change responding to on-going everyday experiences.

[1] “the new...is produced from the very matter of the world...[with] repetition, but with difference.” – Simon O'Sullivan and Stephe Zepke, Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New.

【RE】Restaurant explores spatial possibilities through lighting techniques and materials, shifting the atmospheric qualities of the interior with the changing four seasons. The interior considers materials and lighting which draw from innovative ways of reusing and repurposing food by-products and organic waste.

Located on a local farm in Singapore, 【RE】Restaurant implements the farm-to-table concept. The design uses a range of organic materials that when activated by different lighting techniques radically change to reflect the seasonal shifts during the year seeking to re-connect the diner with the seasonal cultivation of food in the farm it is located within.

Lighting and materials are used as conceptual forces driving the design. Through understanding and experimenting with organic materials, a series of sketches and physical models were developed. Manipulation of the shape and colour of the light to change the visual experience of the space. The combination of lighting techniques changes the texture and quality of the materials to form a different visual experience. Three themes were applied to the design, according to the three different seasons in Singapore.

In this way, 【RE】Restaurant is designed to highlight wider issues around food origin and importation in Singapore. And using lighting, seeks to use to techniques of interior design to connect the diner with the wider seasonal shifts in an otherwise very urban environment. The concepts of low carbon, recycle, reuse is instilled in the mind of customers in an experiential way to achieve the purpose of design.

The U Bein Bridge on Thaungthaman Lake in Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma) is the longest and oldest surviving teak footbridge in the world. The bridge endures the weather and lake conditions all year round since 1850. The bridge is a structure, a relic and a situation, as this project explores a multiplicity of connections between the bridge, its histories, the environment, the lake, and community. As the lake water levels rise, its community is directly affected by the loss of land and the negotiation between human and nature occurs. Throughout the year, this environment is in a constant state of flux, as water levels rise, the bridge disappears, tourism, locals, farming and fishing become interchangeable.

The research has explored how atmospheres have the potential to envelope our senses, and ways of producing an experience with invisible conditions. We utilise our senses knowingly and unknowingly but when we encounter atmospheric qualities our senses become sensitive. This project questions how enhancing atmospheres through the senses can the invisible be encountered? This project responds to this profound situation of Thaungthaman Lake, to frame and amplify atmospheres within the site. The project activates an uninterrupted dialogue with the past, present and future.

The temporal interventions frame the invisible and overlooked conditions in the site by making apparent through traces and material arrangements, what has disappeared, to produce a subtle reference with what existed before and what will continue to endure. The gestures produce new atmospheres, reveal the effects of pollution, whilst rejuvenating a historical landmark for public enjoyment. The atmospheres produced are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing based on the environmental forces. The assemblage of materials collected specifically from the surrounding environment and local industry such as plastic and fishing nets highlight the life span of materials and reappropriates these as part of the interventions.

This research major project is grounded within ideas of human connection and how we inhabit and utilise interior spaces. The research initially investigates these ideas through various strategies and methods of functionality towards dwelling design that revolves around the individual, their needs, and their quality of living. Currently, the project has moved into a focus of developing a means of escapism: a temporary distraction and retreat from the everyday. The project aims to do this by providing a space that promotes well-being through comfort.

The concept of comfort has become an integral component within the project; one that has informed design decisions and considerations through its subjectiveness between individuals. Though the context of the project has shifted from dwelling design, some aspects of the design strategies explored in the earlier stages of the project have led to the current proposal to design space that heightens a sense of escapism and serenity. The ideas have been explored through various processes, including photography, model making, collaging, drawing, and iconography.

It has become clear through the body of work that designing for well-being can be achieved through numerous means. The project focuses on escapism as a way of providing temporary distraction from quotidian moments within one's personal or professional lives. The research has reinforced the importance of rest and comfort, and how these aspects can be utilised within the overall project to re-establish the well-being of people that can sometimes be lost when we are so focused on our own day to day rituals and routines.

We inhabit a world that’s seemingly driven by globalisation, consumerism and a field of social pressures that result in us working longer, socialising more and taking less “time out” for ourselves. This tends to lead to a collective community who are typically time poor, stressed and digitally dependent, resulting in a subtle decline in mental health and physical wellbeing.

This project investigates the idea of “restorative Interiority” a proposed design practice that focuses on the realignment of the mind and body, through a series of spatial and sensory interventions designed to help shift our focus towards an innate state of being. The project develops a series of carefully considered spatial sequences that provide the inhabitant with moments of medicinal exchange. These sequences aim to improve our mental and physical health while facilitating a connection to place, resulting in mindfulness and a form of mental refuge from the outside domain.

Spatial planning and programmatics are key to the design outcome, resulting in a carefully curated journey that plays on 'the meander.' Program is distributed across the site to ensure a subtle shift from passive to active. Passive and private moments allow for solidarity and respite, while open plan active zoning provides opportunities for community engagement and overall restoration. This set of spatial conditions not only responds to the sites program, but also begins to touch on an underlying current global issue of physical proximities within the COVID-19 pandemic. I aim to utilise the passive to active journey as a mode of social re-calibration, helping to restore the city’s social norms in a post COVID environment.

This body of work has re-enforced the importance of creating spaces we can connect with both physically and emotionally while extending the role of our built environment to act as an urban filter. Re-enforcing our future typologies as continuous public offerings, not just final products. a

Doing nothing is hard to do. Speed has been at the core of capitalist values such as productivity, efficiency and consumption. Time to sit still is limited and boredom commonly avoided. However in an age where depression and anxiety are increasingly prevalent we desperately need moments of pause to absorb and process the flux of everyday.

Rou ___ . tine investigates how techniques of ritualisation can be applied to design slow spaces that encourage everyday mindfulness. Slow space is explored as non-commercial “unproductive” space, demanding nothing to enter or stay. It focuses on revealing minor details to facilitate contemplation, reflection and deep listening as forms of self-care.

The project is sited as an extension of the Drummond Terraces, a mixed-use row of residential homes and commercial dwellings in Carlton. The physical connection between the terraces puts neighbours in close proximity, simultaneously the linear configuration creates barriers and social isolation. The project provides a space for gathering in order to foster a community of care. As a transition space between the home or office and the outside world, it acts as a momentary relief from the fast paced rhythm of routines.

Ritual techniques are applied to design a precise performance of actions that cultivate an increased awareness of self, others and the familiar environment. Noticing is prompted through specific vantage points that allow aspects of the site to be concealed and revealed. An arrangement of sheer, fluid textile curtains provide safe yet open spaces and repetitive brick patterns are embraced to evoke a sense of stability.

Rou ___ . tine dedicates space for doing nothing as a way of sustaining ourselves, individually and collectively. It proposes slowing down as an alternative form of productivity, catalysing new processes of creativity, ways of understanding and a deeper appreciation for the ordinary every day.

Sculptured Past investigates concepts of mending and site narratives in relation to urban spaces and the individual. This body of research explores strategies to reconstruct past site narratives into new structures. Through reactivating an unused site, can we bring forth the memory of the past use of place as a means to celebrate it and connect with the community?

Sculptured Past is situated in an abandoned pool centre within the Seabrook Reserve in Broadmeadows, Victoria. The Broadmeadows pool was shut down in 2007 and in the years since fell into disrepair. In 2013 it was demolished leaving minimal traces of its previous existence. The site is currently an under-used reserve. This project proposes a series of interventions back into the park as a means to reactivate the site, and recapture moments of the place before it was demolished. Adjacent to a high school campus, this site can become a valuable asset for both students, parents and locals. This project proposes to bring back that life to the place once more, using the blueprints of what once had existed.

Through material investigations and research into Japanese techniques of Kintsugi, the design celebrates the beauty of the parkland before it was destroyed. The project speculates on the past, present and future of the site. It questions how we can use memory, historical fragments, and site research within a design process.

To conclude, the project asks, how can physically constructing past site narratives encourage people to activate the park land with their own memory of the place?

This research project proposes ways of rethinking a hospitality environment after Coronavirus pandemic. As public venues are facing challenges to accommodate people and sociability, this research project explores how public spaces need to become more elastic and adaptable to the ‘new normal.’ This project is a critique of the value of café culture, post pandemic, and an exploration into adaptive spatial strategies through the redesign of a café. The research questions how can rethinking and adapting a program in the hospitality context affords a stronger sense of community, connectivity and belonging. Social distancing will be a condition to consider in the future, and social connectivity is now even more critical, especially for our sense of well-being.

This project explores ways to provide social connection where social interaction and well-being can be foregrounded, through rethinking ways of negotiating personal safety whilst also maintaining a café ambience and place for assembly.

Through techniques for non-physical and physical connection, the project has engaged in ways to incite connection and belonging. Through techniques explored at both micro and macro scales such as joinery, furniture, material arrangements and junctions, and spatial compositions such as frames, thresholds and boundaries.

The project is situated in my family owned café in Knoxfield, Ferntree Gully. The research draws from my Malaysian culture and explores ways of interweaving certain spatial qualities I have studied from the Kopitiams (coffee shops) in Malaysia where there is a strong communal dynamic and permeability between people and their environment. This research has informed an approach to rethinking the site and the interior as an environment and a place for the community – with a desire to support the need for social assembly whilst also addressing unprecedented social desires.

I am interested in questioning and testing the conceptual and physical boundaries of what it means to be human within the public realm. In particular, seeking to challenge what I see as the conventional notion of the passive and virtually absorbed consumer which governs much of the current understanding and design of public space in modern urban centres. My design work seeks to find design opportunities to break the confinement of this passivity by emphasising the connection between the individual and their surroundings.

These ambitions have been dramatically challenged by the Covid pandemic which has severely impacted our physical freedoms in public spaces and increased our dependence upon screens in ways that have never occurred before. This project proposes a set of wearable garments and spatial apparatus that draw attention to the intangible connections between people and their environment.

In my work, I emphasise themes of fluidity, flexibility and adaptability for individuals and groups in public space. I have developed a system of wearable apparatus and spatial structures that are exemplified by what I call a bubble structure that connects individuals to their surroundings and each other. The wearable devices have a relationship to both fashion and interior design and generate a dynamic and open space for a multiplicity of activities and visual display. These embody thresholds between two spaces and between the public and the private.

I have developed and produced a series of interventions that invite embodied participation for individuals to challenge the imposed boundaries and regulations that govern social space during the pandemic. These interventions choreograph movement, costume and collaboration to highlight the human body as well as the bubble structure that generate a dialogue between inside and outside experience.

I employ methods of collaging and crafting textiles and costumes, drawing on colours, fabrics, architecture. The materiality of the bubbles is key to the experimentation of the different spaces. Surfaces are conceived as membranes composed of different patterns on the outside, softness on the inside with cotton to form the structure. I see these as a series or a range of wearable devices to be worn in public spaces s and to be first exhibited at a fashion event as part of Melbourne fashion week.

Shift and Stay is a sustainable residential design, aiming to serve a number of international students from different places around the world seeking shared accommodation. The design perfectly combines different lifestyles into a compact-living space. The project site is located in the heritage car park in which has been developed and transformed into a housing residential neighbourhood, supporting approximately one hundred overseas students.

Nowadays, people in the suburbs tend to move and live privately in a smaller area in a big city rather than live with their family. So too do international students who travel far from their hometown to share the same limited space. This trend of living results from the world urbanisation which makes people move into an overcrowded downtown space looking for a better opportunity yet they need to handle the cost of the high-priced living. Moreover, the high demand for this temporary-staying lifestyle makes it fewer options to fit each individual’s needs.

The design addresses this issue and brings some moveable elements to maximise the use of the limited area as well as provide multi-functional housing furniture—such as a sofa convertible to a dining table or splitable into a pair of chairs—which makes the most of the adaptive design to support their diverse lifestyles and temporary staying. Shift and Stay enables the space where we own less but share and borrow more. The shared and wall-less rooms allow more interpersonal interaction and encourage a warmer sense of community yet still providing people sense of privacy.

In the context of the current global pandemic, technology has heavily mediated our social lives as we endure border closures, social distancing and city lockdowns. Our city may have become distanced to us since the sounds of daily life within public spaces has come to a silencing halt. Within Melbourne, we are confined within our 5KM radiuses thus the sounds of our public and private spaces are remixed and re-imagined.

The notion of sonic public spaces has emerged through the interest of investigating what opportunities sound can offer to facilitate social interactions and connections at a time when we have to be socially distanced. Through a series of explorations, the concept of a sonic public space has been investigated through mappings, sound recordings, compositions and drawings.

Sonic Intersections aims to propose an alternate typology to public spaces that is not limited to the existing infrastructure and the built environment.

Using sound as a medium to create a network of connected urban interiors through the immersive presence of others, this project aims to re-map our urban landscape by producing sonic communities within a distributed network. By building intimate relationships through the listening experience, individuals are able to interact form non-physical connections within these new sonic public spaces.

The translation of physical environments into sonic spaces offers up alternate methods for us to design for the future of social, cultural and political connections within our urban interior. Sonic Intersections speculates on the potentials for these methods to encourage a greater sense of belonging and collectivity.

Daily life has been greatly changed by the pandemic of 2020 which has made the everyday a different place for most of us, with strict new rules of social distancing consisting of minimal physical contact and time constraints, in order to lessen the spread of the virus. Interaction between people has been diminished, engagement with real spaces, real bodies, with proximity itself has been lost. Although we are slowly returning to a less regulated life, humanity’s new norm will demand many changes to our everyday experiences most particularly within the urban context.

This body of work speculates on possible future public spaces that allow for physical and social encounters to naturally occur. Using the notion of measured thresholds within public spaces in the city, these design approaches simultaneously ensure distancing and also interaction among individuals.

The focus is to find ways of reactivating urban public spaces, to understand how individuals once used the spaces and what changes need to be enforced to ensure sensible social distancing solutions. The project considers ways to reframe the experience of spaces within the city to promote both proximity and physical distancing as well as to shift the behaviours of individuals to bring awareness of this new way of living.

The work emphasizes little encounters, ordinary moments of looking and the dignity of the overlooked. The spaces designed for this project are selected from micro sites that are often unnoticed within the Melbourne CBD. They emphasize the body and its place within open thresholds which are demarcated through a range of approaches, some constructed while others utilize technology. These methods seek to establish public and private spaces, the interior and exterior, whilst emphasizing social connection and shared experiences.

The project proposes the interior as a staged space which has the potential to draw attention and enhance experience. Staging of a specific activity and space produces a deep impression which can inform people to be aware of something otherwise ignored. The research explores ideas of staging and immersing to shift and create awareness through techniques of performing, lighting, framing, hanging, reflecting, raising, with material arrangement, material transformations and spatial proximities.

Two pavilions are situated at Rayner’s Orchard, in the Yarra Ranges, an hour from Melbourne. Each pavilion is connected to site yet activated separately according to the change of the seasons. A Summer Pavilion and Winter Pavilion produce a spatial relationship to the existing environment by allowing the visitor a new scenic experience. Each pavilion frames and elevates the orchard as a situation and ecology of seasonal and environmental conditions and functions.

The Summer Pavilion is an open and elevated walkway which intervenes into an existing pathway often travelled for the visitors’ tour raised off the ground plane, staging the orchard from above it provides a new relationship to the horizon line and re-presents the orchard.

The Winter Pavilion provides more shelter and offers a platform for visitors to experience the orchard in closer proximity, to pause and interact with the fruit of the orchard. There is a contrast between the two pavilions, whilst also a progression.

With an underlying interest in food sourcing and ethical eating, the research is also concerned with the orchard as a situation where food is considered part of a greater environmental context, system, and ecology. The project explores how seasonality can be staged to shift awareness concerning eating. Staging The Orchard employs poetic and performative techniques intending to stimulate and inform an understanding of the processes involved in food production.

Grounded at home facing screens, the experience of participation in the physical world is being dulled, while subtle emotions and perceptions of virtual dimensions are being magnified. Our primary concern on a daily basis shifts from the dazzling world to our empty city, local community, others' lives and ultimately back to ourselves.

Seeking relief for amplified stress and anxiety, people continue to consume in various forms to satisfy so-called self-care. However, rather than being held hostage by consumerism, it is time to reconsider our desire and true value of products. Are we buying into a product, or a meticulous shopping experience?

Responding to current times, the fictional brand Studio X was established and developed to deliver experiences as intangible commodities that cost time and effect with emotional value.

Motivated by memorable experiences that the retail industry previously offered, this research project examines and evaluates strategies for facilitating and augmenting consuming experiences, explores the potential of utilizing these methodologies to activate virtual space and provides an interactive platform for retail therapy.

The major research project is in the form of a virtual fashion show occurring in the realms of physical and virtual space, subtly weaving in and out of tangible reality. A series of experiential ideas about story-telling, spatial arrangement and customer immersion stimulating sensory pleasure were tested through multiple techniques. The website documents an interactive simulation of surroundings, blurs the boundary between commercial sites and the clutter of one’s living space with a glamour illusion of the brand (Studio X).

Through positive interaction and engagement with the brand, affective encounters, being the emotional attachment to virtual or physical objects, are produced. By enhancing affective encounter and providing emotional relief, rooted emotional connections between a space, a brand and the audience can be built.

Support is needed more than ever within the present global situation of the pandemic. We are living in an uncomfortable situation and are lacking a sense of connection. Support can be a form of comfort and well-being. The origin of the word comfort translates as something that is strengthening, supportive and consoling, which produces the provocation for this research inquiry. The research explores how techniques and ideas in comfort and support are more than a subjective experience and propose ways to offer a means of support by bringing people together to facilitate togetherness.

The research questions how a practice of interior design acts as a framework of support to facilitate and program togetherness? Retail has been profoundly impacted by the Coronavirus Pandemic and sites across the city are becoming empty or put up for lease. This research project has responded to this emergent situation by exploring support as an agile and provisional structure that can activate these unoccupied spaces to foster neighbourhood and community.

Support Act is an assortment of programs through material assemblages within the site of 1069 Mt. Alexander Road, Essendon, located in a retail precinct. The project aims to create an event out of temporal systems of support to produce cultural and creative infrastructure. The structures are frames and platforms that allow for people temporarily occupying the space to use and engage with depending on their needs. The project employs techniques of physical joinery and furniture arrangements that become platforms for conversation, display, retail, art and community engagement. Furthermore, the project looks to blur the boundary between private retail space and community by connecting these two entities through the façade.

I have always loved visiting the gallery. I remember going as a kid and being excited to spend the day in this prominent place full of art. I think that these experiences shaped me as a child, they gave me an appreciation and curiosity for art, and as I have grown older visiting galleries has remained a favourite past time.

This project questions how a relationship between the body and art viewing experience, can produce a new way of encountering art. It intends to generate a dialogue on the importance of art, viewing and experiencing through a shift in approaching the design of exhibition spaces, which disrupt the gallery’s institutional model. The practice has explored the merging of exhibition design with ideas of interiority to produce ways of designing for dynamic encounters and interactions which destabilise the conventional methods of viewing art.

The exhibition design encourages slowing down, lingering and learning to transpire through the bodies encounter with experiencing art. The collection of research employs tactics of proximity, mystery, storytelling, and a critical understanding of the artworks themselves to design a detailed and insightful exhibition that celebrates the art it holds.

This project aims to make art accessible to those who do not have access to regional and national galleries. ‘The Art and I’ will tour through rural towns, offering the opportunity for communities to experience contemporary art. In a post-pandemic world, this project also addresses a new way of viewing that considers social distancing. Never have we needed to be more aware of how bodies move through space and interact with each other. This exhibition will rupture the way we navigate through space and reframe the encounter of art, finding new relationships between art pieces and body.

How can designers make human senses in interior spaces communicate more intimately with external surroundings in different environments by using principles of porosity in surfaces?

A person’s bodily senses are intimately connected to their surrounding environment. So too is the internal experience of a space influenced by the dynamic relationship to the exterior. The closed boundary of much modernist architecture creates a barrier between people and the environment. The Porous Boundary is about the relationship between human beings, architecture, and the environment.

The research considers how to balance or rethink the needs of people, buildings and the environment, provoke interactions and bring them into a state of dynamic flow. The research asks: how may the design process reconceive the surfaces or boundary as a porous phenomenon that enables a more intimate communication between the interior and exterior surroundings? This exploration creates more possibilities for human interaction with the natural environment through the use of partitions, porous apertures, and incisions onto surfaces or the combination of different materials of the boundary to facilitate the communication of information and phenomena from the interior and exterior.

The result is a sensitive interior space that facilitates sensory experience. These methods can be called porous surfaces. As part of this exploration, I have considered the role of site conditions and the role of nano colour-changing materials on the porous surface as another means to bring external information into the interior.

This research seeks to rethink the forms of future boundaries between interior and exterior space. By dissolving and harmonizing these oppositions I seek to heighten communication between people and the external world, to improve people’s well-being and develop more potential and possibilities for internal space.

Archiving is a method of cataloguing experience; as a means to capture a moment in time preserving for future generations the information and experiences that have shaped society. Like an archive, theatre and scenography can be used as a tool to record and represent experience through documentation and storytelling. Theatre in its is purest form is a reflection of our current society and becomes a frame to project our views and perspectives on the world. During these unprecedented times, can theatre become a device to record, map and document the continuation of unfolding events?

Theatre Archive is a research-based project that aims to produce a series of recorded narratives centred around this current year (2020). It is an ongoing process of documenting and choreographing gestures and behaviours that are specific to online communication during the course of this year; as well as examining the relationship between the virtual and physical landscapes. Techniques of notation, performance, sound recording, and video have been translated into a manuscript that records, archives and speculates on the year’s events. The manuscript has then been curated into a series of framed sequences that catalogues this year into a non-linear format. Flicking between different scenes, the story of 2020 beings to formulate different connotations and associations as a way to inform this year’s unpredictability. Which then in turn serves as a form of documentation and a piece of archival information to be performed and viewed by future generations.

In-between is a space that seems to be inferior and hidden in the practical interplay of our interiority and exteriority of the world. Traversing [in] betweenness explores this position of the in-between as a situational condition that unfolds actively with the movement of the body, in relation to space and time. This speculative project challenges the convention of transitional spaces as liminal and considers techniques for encountering the urban interior through reimagining the way one navigates and negotiates the city.

Hong Kong is a dense, complex, and compressed urban interior which reveals the delight and difficulty that arises from intensified urban living. Its urban context is therefore crucial in addressing the impact of travelling. Situated at the Central mid-level escalator, this site is a series of situations explored in relation to ideas of the in-between and offers new ways of traversing the city and encountering the urban interior.

This research addresses the concern of the growing developments in convenient, efficient technologies emerging in large cities, which are immensely accelerating our pace of life and slowly impairing our bodily engagement within this practical world. By disrupting the existing flows, speed and rhythm within the city, site, and situations; this notion of the in-between is intended to produce a dynamism with time and space in attempting to re-address our self-awareness to the inside, outside.

The research priorities time and space as two distinct conditions that are closely intertwining and inter-dependant. The notion of rupture is introduced as a concept and tactic for producing situations in a state of becoming. Materials, surfaces, screens and apparatus’ disrupt the existing in-between situations, to produce a rupturing, which is a new betweenness, that proliferates to form a relational shift with ourself, with other people and the city.

In our increasingly fast-paced globalised society, stress and anxiety have become a pressing issue, as we put more pressure onto ourselves to achieve more and cram more into our day. Crucial time for ourselves to slow down, rejuvenate, and connect back to nature has become somewhat of a luxury in contemporary society.

Located in Fitzroy, Well is the New Wealth proposes a new community-focused wellness infrastructure offering, focusing predominantly on relieving stress and anxiety. The offering combines Wim Hof cold therapy wellness practices with tailored biophilic inspired atmospheric interiors to create immersive, rejuvenating experiences for the community. An emphasis is put on sourcing local, natural materials to foster a re-connect between the body and the local natural environment as well as minimising the carbon footprint of the project.

Well is the New Wealth emphasises the need to create interior environments that are not just pleasing to the eye but offer a sensory, emotional, and immersive experience. One that lasts long after your leave.