New books - November/December

A few new books in the library are listed below. You can also see a list of recent print additions to the library (the list is sorted by dewey decimal number - the most relevant areas for the school of architecture & design might be 307, 711-729, 745, 747 and 749). Also, to search for new books by topic, try your search, refine the results to books and order by publication date - e.g., urban design.

Please send any library requests to Tristan or Vivian for graphic arts.

Imminent commons: urban questions for the near future (Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017)
The cities of the world stand at a crossroads. Amidst radical social, economic, and technological transformations, will the city become a driving force of creativity, diversity, and sustainability, or will it be a mechanism of inequality, despair, and environmental decay? At this critical moment, where do the stakes lie and what are the agents of change? From the time of its birth, the city has been held together by the commons.

The book includes essays by Alejandro Zaera, Hyungmin Pai, Maider Llaguno, Nerea Calvillo, Hyewon Lee, Lindsay Bremner, Alex Ivancic, Iñaki Abalos, Charles Waldheim, David Gissen, Carlo Ratti, Daniele Belleri, Antoine Pico, Saskia Saseen, Adam Greenfield, Jesse LeCavalier, Philip Rode, Duncan McLaren, Julian Agyeman, Gunter Pauli, Gramazio and Kohler, Mario Carpo, Dirk E. Hebel, Marta H. Wisniewska, Felix Heisel, Mitchell Joachim, and Christian Hubert.
The first publication of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, proposes a

Special issue of CoDesign on “Repositioning Codesign in the Age of Platform Capitalism: From Sharing to Caring”

CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts

What can I contribute?

What role might co-design play in establishing new and different commons-based forms of economic activities and systems

- Theoretical relations between co-design and commons-based peer production

- Empirical cases of co-design in the context of commons-based peer production

How does the collaborative character of co-design interrelate with the commodification of

Society for Artistic Research conference 2018 - Artistic research will eat itself

11-13 April 2018, University of Plymouth.

Critical perspectives on the discourse surrounding artistic research might be argued to already be too formulaic or self-defeating. Making a case for its own institutional legitimacy could unwittingly reinforce some of the very things artistic research aims to critique. Yet such onto-epistemological paradoxes can offer a rich territory for exploration along with generative practices that involve reflexivity, automorphogenesis, and recursive feedback loops. In recognising auto-cannibalism as an analogy for broader socio-political and environmental concerns, one of the challenges for artistic research is to respond imaginatively to the dynamic tensions between self-destruction and regeneration.

We encourage the exploration of auto-cannibalism in its widest interpretation and invite researchers, artists and scholars of all backgrounds and in all stages of their careers to think

Designing Services for the new Swanston Library

A recent article in ‘Advances in Librarianship’ (de Jong, 2014) argues that libraries which adopt service design methods may see increases in user satisfaction and patronage. 

In 2017, 18 students in the GRAP2494 Service Design for Communication Designers, a new course in the Master of Communication Design at RMIT University, carried out a service design project with the recently redesigned Swanston Library. 

This panel, consisting of the course coordinator and some students in the course, will discuss how service design was applied, their findings and what they have learned from their semester-long project.

When: Thursday 23 November 2017
Where: 12pm-1pm

Register via Eventbrite

Google, Shmoogle. Reference Librarians Are Busier Than Ever

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Even in the internet age, reference librarians still dig up answers that require extra effort, searching old books, microfilm and paper files, looking for everything from owners of long-defunct firms to 19th-century weather reports. Though online searches are now at the fingertips of most people, many still prefer to call or visit a library. Some can’t or don’t use computers; others recognize librarians have search skills and access to databases that search engines can’t match."

This article is behind a paywall but lucky for RMIT staff and students - the Library has a sub to the Wall Street Journal. Read the full article online.

Human-Computer Interaction

Human-Computer Interaction
A Journal of Theoretical, Empirical, and Methodological Issues of User Science and System Design

Call for Papers for a Special Issue on Open Design at the Intersection of Making and Manufacturing

Innovations in interaction design come from both familiar forms of professional design and
engineering, as well as non-professional networks of people ‘hacking’ and ‘making’ together, rapidly prototyping their own designs, developing and building bespoke inventions and making adaptations to existing technologies. 

For example, through innovative combinations of digital software and physical hardware, the Internet of Things is being prototyped and pioneered within ‘maker’ communities,  makerspaces and Fab Labs across the globe, in forms ranging from simple devices to complex systems. At the same time, industrial production cultures at the ‘tech periphery’,

STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY - History, Environment, and Risk in Architecture

Department of Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
April 5-7, 2018

Abstracts due November 15, 2017

Architecture, broadly considered as the intentional design of the built environment, is an important symbolic and material aspect of this structural instability. Operating at the nexus of processes of financialization, material metabolisms, and urban organization, the work of design mediates these conditions and contributes to our understanding of them. The seemingly unpredictable relationship between social practices and planetary systems also has a rich history, as do the conditions of social inequity that environmental pressures continue to intensify. By framing this symposium through architecture, the intent is to emphasize the intensity and indeterminacy of how economies and ecologies interconnect.

This symposium is interested in understanding instability as a theme in architectural, urban, and environmental histories and theories. We aim to explore how the structural instabilities of the 21st century are legible in histories of architecture and related spatio-political disciplines, insofar as they engage questions of economy, race, gender, and environmental

The Plan Journal open issue

The Plan Journal Open Issue

Dates: 31 Oct, 2017 – 15 Jan, 2018

THE PLAN Journal (TPJ) intends to disseminate and promote innovative, thought-provoking and relevant research, studies and criticism in architecture and urbanism. The criteria for selecting contributions will be innovation, clarity of purpose and method, and potential transformational impact on disciplinary fields or the broader socio-cultural context. The ultimate purpose of the TPJ is to enrich the dialog between research and professional fields, in order to encourage both applicable new knowledge and intellectually driven modes of practice. 

See The Plan Journal website for more information and to read open access articles.

The RMIT Library currently subscribes to The Plan magazine.

Unmaking Waste 2018

UNMAKING WASTE 2018:

Transforming Design, Production and Consumption for a Circular Economy           

Hosted by the China Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, University of South Australia, Adelaide, September 20-23, 2018

Over the last two decades, much effort has gone into developing strategies to reduce waste and emissions in products, systems and the urban environment. Accelerating rates of consumption and discard, however, continue to undermine many of these larger efforts. It is clear that we need new systems-based approaches to reduce rising levels of resource consumption and energy use in order to implement a more equitable and environmentally sustainable society and economy. Building upon the experience of our first conference,Unmaking Waste: Transforming Production and Consumption in Time and Place (May 2015),Unmaking Waste 2018 will address the following themes from a similarly multidisciplinary perspective:

1. Eco-Design and Development:

Designing and managing objects, buildings, precincts and systems to reduce resource and energy use, and increase environmental and human wellbeing.

2. Sustainable Consumption:

Transforming consumption and service provision, including marketing, to better suit a resource-constrained, environmentally challenged world.

2018 AIGA Design Educators Community Conference: [MAKE]

Design educators, researchers, and practitioners know that making is complex and heterogeneous. We do not make as a way to simply sharpen the end of a pre-defined process. We make to think, explain, and conceptualize. We make to communicate, mediate, and teach, to formalize, plan, and provoke, to explore, process, and improve. [Make] seeks

EOI - Charrette, the journal of the Association of Architectural Educators

Charrette volume 6, issue 1 (2019) will have the theme 'Flipping the Script: Foregrounding the Architecture Student.' We invite papers and essays that foreground the experiences and perspectives of architecture students.

- Guest Editor – James Thompson, University of Portsmouth
- Editor – James Benedict Brown, Association of Architectural Educators (AAE)
- Assistant Editor – Amanda Hufford, Association of Architectural Educators (AAE)

THEME
Traditionally, educational theories have foregrounded teaching by focusing on aspects like pedagogy and curriculum from the position of the educator. Whereas learning has certainly been stated as a chief objective of education, the assumption has been that learning can be expected to occur if teachers are knowledgeable and passionate. Consider Donald Schön’s infamous portrayal of Petra as an (uncritical) architecture student who models the behaviour of her tutor Quist. In the time since this publication, a paradigm shift within higher education has engendered theories of learning and practices that acknowledge the agency of students in the learning process. Education is frequently

The Art of Publishing: An Exhibition of MACK Books

Perimeter is thrilled to be presenting a major exhibition of MACK books to be held at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne in January. 

The exhibition, which will run from Friday 5th to Saturday 20th January, 2018, traces the history of the revered London-based photographic and art book publisher, and will be accompanied by a public program including a major lecture by MACK founder and director Michael Mack on the opening weekend and a talk in Sydney the following week.

The Art of Publishing: An Exhibition of MACK Books will open at the CCP on Friday 5th January, 2018; followed by a lecture and gallery tour by Michael Mack titled A Serpentine Progression on Saturday 6th; and portfolio reviews with Michael Mack and Perimeter director Dan Rule on Sunday 7th. A conversation with Dan Rule and Michael Mack will take place at Books Kinokuniya in Sydney on Tuesday 9th January. All times and ticketing information TBC.

Inflection journal

Inflection vol. 5 examines the theme of Feedback within the discipline of architecture.

Designers are increasingly being asked to implement the products of data collection. Technological developments mean that information is exchanged between humans and machines at unprecedented speeds. To become useful feedback, data requires synthesis and design intent. How can we better use this feedback in our built environments?

Inflection vol. 5 invites academics, students and professionals to consider the practical, moral and technical implications and implementations of feedback. We welcome and invite

Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture -- Special Theme Issue on Interiors + Pedagogy

As academic subject matter, interiors permeate the curricula of multiple interrelated disciplines that together provide the educational foundation for an expanded range of creative and professional practices. Such interiors-oriented academic programs cut across fields like architecture, design, and art and are as diverse as the types of practices that shape contemporary interiors spatially and discursively. Any overall view of interiors education as such resists singularity, simplification, or standardization, benefiting instead from frameworks that embrace diversity, multivalence, and heterogeneity. The most innovative, influential, and effective pedagogies have the capacity not only to mirror practice, but also shape its future trajectories.

This theme issue of Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture seeks to bring together a wide variety of exemplary pedagogical approaches that represent the latest innovations of interiors education.

What constitutes an entry into interiors education, and how does one define its intellectual

Writing | Architecture

Special Issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses

Call for Papers — Writing | Architecture. Editors: Professor Eleni Bastéa and Dr Patrick West

The long, entangled and fascinating association of architecture with writing has always been interwoven with concerns pertaining to the well-being of individuals and communities. Writing and architecture connect the self to others, and as much as we are shaped by the structures, cities and landscapes we inhabit, the stories that flow through our built and natural environments transform us. At the same time, traversing these connections and transformations, architecture and writing are molded by distinct disciplinary traditions, cultural imperatives and artistic and creative affordances, even in their synergistic co-existence. Furthermore, complicating and enriching the historical narrative of writing’s dialogues with architecture (and its imbrications with issues of human well-being), the emergence of the new materialism and related trains of practice and thought has served to expand the possibilities of re-inventing the human form through interaction with the diverse and challenging energies of the non-human. Through divergent, shared and holistic approaches, writers, scholars and designers are describing new and old types of practice that connect and re-connect the animate and the inanimate, the living and the constructed.

TEXT is a fully refereed journal focused on the processes of writing and the teaching of writing, and this special issue aims to continue, interrogate and elaborate the conversation between architecture and writing that has preoccupied so many authors and architecture practitioners over time. Contributions may adopt a variety of scholarly and literary modes so