Coming Up
Past Conferences

Upcoming conferences

There are currently no upcoming conferences at the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.

Past conferences

Design Thinking Research Symposium 8

19 - 20 October 2010

DTRS8: Interpreting Design Thinking, is a two-day symposium set up to stimulate discussion between design thinking researchers, business researchers and practitioners about the ways design activities, design skills and abilities (aka 'design thinking') can be interpreted for other professional fields. DTRS8 is hosted by the University of Technology, Sydney—Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.

SIAF Symposium

24 September 2010

The UTS: SIAF 2010 symposium is a cross-disciplinary event that brings together researchers, animators, and industry practitioners from the full spectrum of animation practice including 2D and 3D digital / film, CGI visual effects, graphic visualization of data sets, object-oriented programming and animation studies across all aspects of time-based media.

New Interfaces for Musical Expression++

15 - 18th June 2010

Expression is a central notion of humankind. It is what we do - when we have an idea, we write, draw, sculpt, speak, type, dance, touch - we want to express. We need to express. It is through expression that we make a change in the world, from the most modest little concept to deep and profound structures.

A broad program of events is envisioned. It includes the academic conference on the theme of expression in music and Human-Computer Interaction, with satellite symposia on expression in intersecting disciplines such as dance, architecture, information design, urban media, video, games, theatre and design, exploring the interdisciplinary collaborations engaged through expression and multimodality. There will be an extensive artistic program of concerts, exhibitions, performances and presentations and workshops for specialist academic, pedagogical and hands-on making communities.

Visit the official NIME++ 2010 site

Doing DAB: Connecting and communicating postgraduate research

27 - 28 April 2010

DAB currently has a wealth of innovative, diverse and interesting postgraduate research, however, many of us have little knowledge of our peers' work. Subsequently, Doing DAB: Connecting and Communicating Postgraduate Research is a conference where doctoral and masters researchers can come together, share their research and discuss common issues and understandings about being a design researcher. This inaugural two day event aims to unite the DAB research community and provide a forum for research students to present their current research projects as well as participate in a series of panel discussions. Doing DAB will also include a keynote speech by Professor Ken Friedman and an address by the Dean of Research, Professor Kees Dorst. Supervisors are encouraged to attend and take part.

For more information about Doing DAB contact Bec Paton or Todd Robinson.

SEAM Symposium

SEAM09, Spatial Phrases
7 - 19 September 2009

The SEAM symposium emphasises processes of connection and addition, perforation and permeability, blending and merging. While the seam can be pragmatic and functionally driven, it is also a process of mutation and modification. Disciplinary borders are rephrased as permeable seams, whose crossing connects and mutually transforms each field. The symposium aims to question existing structures and ways of working in the fields of dance, architecture and film, in order to provoke alternative inventions and thought.

Visit the official Seam 2009 site.

Fashioning Now: Changing the Way We Make and Use Clothes

28 July - 28 August 2008

Investigating the way in which clothing is produced, used and discarded, Fashioning Now is an exhibition and accompanying symposium featuring innovative research projects from Australian and international practitioners. Accompanying free public events include exhibition floor talk and workshops.

This project has been assisted by the New South Wales Government through its Environmental Trust. Supported by the University of Technology, Sydney and UTS Gallery. Fashioning Now is a Program Partner of SD09, Powerhouse Museum presents Sydney Design 09.

Urban Futures: Architectural Type and the Urban Plan Symposium

4 May 2009

Urban Futures: Architectural Type and the Urban Plan, is a one day Symposium to explore urban renewal and re-organisation, and how urban plans are produced through the key question: What are the alternative instruments to control the design of our cities beyond land-use zoning, set-backs and plot ratios?

Rejecting the notion of a one size fits all urban plan, raising a challenge to the current blunt urban instruments of set backs, floor space ratios and block zoning, this symposium will instead begin to consider ways of working that can create a more inclusive framework for the varied stakeholders operating in the contemporary city.

Speaking at the symposium will be Chris Lee and Sam Jacoby from the Architecture Association in London, world leaders in urban design.

URBAN FUTURES: Architectural Type and the Urban Plan will be held in the Barnet Long Room at Customs House, Sydney on 4 May 2009. Tickets are available from moshtix and cost $65.00.

The symposium and exhibition are supported by UTS Gallery, the British Council, City of Sydney, UTS's Centre for Contemporary Design Practices, the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at UTS, and The Architectural Association, London.

View symposium details on DAB events.

SmartLight Sydney at UTS

Exhibition and Symposia at UTS
May - June 2009

The SmartLight Symposia compliments the ..ArtLight Exhibition, exhibiting work by 11 of the top lighting designers and light artists in Australia.

The Symposia is one of the major events participating in Smart Light Sydney, part of the 2009 Vivid Sydney Festival, which includes: a Light Walk, Light Art Exhibition and the Conservatorium of Music.

The exhibition and symposium will take place over May and June of 2009.

Read Designers Unite in Smart Light Sydney Festival in DAB news.
Visit the official SmartLight Sydney Festival site.

Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation

4th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia
27 September - 29 September 2007

Specific technologies are continually transferred to architecture from fields such as logistics, psychology and medicine, media and entertainment, warfare, transportation, mining, food and agriculture. Technology transfer includes 'hard' material technologies of manufacturing and construction as well as 'soft technologies' of imaging and information that are taken up in the design process and penetrate the very structure of architectural practice. Such technology transfer is sometimes seen to threaten the supposed internal consistency and specificity of architectural techniques at the same time as it is keenly sought after. Its effect on notions of design intentions and their realization is a key problematic of interest to this conference.

For more information please visit the AASA 2007 conference web site.

Fashion in Fiction Conference

A cooperation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building
26 - 27 May, 2007

This transdisciplinary conference, a creative collaboration between the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, will investigate the role fashion has played in fictional narratives from the 19th century to the present. In particular, it will examine specific fashion discourses or conversations within fiction, assessing the role, function, and purposes of clothes, fashion movements, style and image to create narratives within narratives.

For more information please visit the Fashion in Fiction Conference web site.

Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference

Centre for Social Theory & Design
20 - 21 February 2007

Drawing together scholars from a broad interdisciplinary field, the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference aims to encourage discussion of queer space conceived in its broadest sense, by scholars working in disciplines as diverse as architecture, history, urban geography, design, visual communication, cultural studies, and the social sciences. It aims to explore ways in which the built environment contributes to the construction and maintenance of queer sub-cultures, and articulate how both architectural space and the city can represent ideas such as 'queerness'.

Using the city of Sydney as one example, the conference opens to broader international approaches by proposing that, while in many spheres of world affairs Australia is seen as peripheral, in the already 'marginal' space of queer culture Sydney is a major international location, especially during events such as the Mardi Gras. Drawing upon this reversal of definitions of 'centre' and 'periphery', this conference asks what is central, and what is peripheral, to the study of queer space.

For more information please visit the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference website.

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity Conference 2006

Centre for Social Theory & Design
17 - 19 August 2006

Walter Benjamin's work remains central to discussions of modernity within the Humanities, Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. This conference will bring together scholars working on all aspects of Benjamin's work as well as those who deploy the insights of that work in developing projects of their own.

The conference has been organised by the Centre for Social Theory and Design, in particular: Dr Tara Forrest, Professor Andrew Benjamin and Dr Charles Rice.

The aim of the Centre for Social Theory and Design is to provide a location for research that draws on the traditions of Critical and Social Theory, Philosophy, Design Theory and History, and Architectural History and Theory.

Please visit the official Walter Benjamin Conference 2006 web site for more details.

Australasian Universities Building Educators Association (AUBEA) Conference 2006

Faculty's School of the Built Environment
12 - 14 July 2006

The Faculty's School of Construction Property & Project Management will host the 31st Annual Conference. With a general conference theme of "Building in Value", day one will have a teaching focus, day two an industry focus (industry day) and day three a research focus (research day). This web site provides information to help you submit a paper, register for the conference and plan your trip to Sydney. The AUBEA 2006 conference web site will be regularly updated as conference details are developed.

The principle aim of AUBEA is to promote and improve teaching and research in building through communication and collaboration. It also aims to coordinate efforts to market the discipline of building to prospective students, research partners and clients.

In 2006, the scope of the conference has deliberately been widened to include themes relating to property and land economics.

Please visit the official AUBEA Conference 2006 web site for more details.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND PLACE: the designs of resistance

Inaugural Conference of the Centre for Social Theory and Design held at UTS 21 - 22 October 2005

The keynote speakers were Catherine Malabou. University of Paris X (Nanterre); Cameron Tonkinwise. University of Technology Sydney; Eyal Weizman. Goldsmiths College University of London; Duncan Ivinson. University of Sydney

The cosmopolitan can be used to begin to locate oppositional strategies to globalisation while at the time allowing for the development of sites of resistance - sites allowing for a reconfiguring of terms such as 'place', 'region' etc. However, what seems to have been positioned beyond such possibilities is design. (Design in this context is to be given the greatest extension possible. It included architecture as much as that which is institutionally identified with design.) In the 1920s when design was explicated in terms of style, the latter was often defined in relation to the national question. It was argued that style reflected, or should reflect, national concerns. The simple move to the international - where the counter to the national becomes no more that a ubiquitous internationalism - fails to address the possibility that there maybe on the level of design a correlate to cosmopolitanism. Fundamental to such a possibility would be the recognition that cosmopolitanism, in giving priority to place and region - at least as a beginning - cannot be reduced to a single organising set of ideas let alone a single appearance. Hence the question - how is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and design to be understood?

Answering this question necessitates as much a theoretical and philosophical reflection on the nature of the cosmopolitan, if not design itself, as it does interventions by architects and designers. Part of the process was the development of modes of thinking proper to a productive interplay of cosmopolitanism and design.

This conference brought together leading philosophers, architectural theorists, architects and designers to explore the differing possibilities to which a rethinking of design might give rise.

IMAGINARY WORLDS. Image and Space

International Symposium 14 October 2005

The Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, in conjunction with Supanova Pop Culture Expo hosted an international symposium on October 14, 2005 in Sydney, Australia.

Please visit the Symposium papers to access published papers from this Symposium.

The significance of this symposium was to bring together scholars to share their expertise in the field of graphic novels, comics, animation, literature and computer gaming.

The Symposium addressed the design and construction of 'imaginary worlds' and explored the many and varied ways in which image and space, both real and imagined, are formed and transformed in popular culture and how culturally specific knowledge and design practices are articulated and conveyed.