Videos by Nicole Gardner
The Japanese architect Shoei Yoh is an internationally recognised figure of late 20th century arc... more The Japanese architect Shoei Yoh is an internationally recognised figure of late 20th century architecture and a pioneer of digital design. In 2019 Yoh deposited his architectural office archive including drawings, digital model files, photographs, project notes, architectural magazines, and physical models with the Faculty of Design at Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. Since then, a research team from Kyushu University and the University of New South Wales, Sydney have collaborated to digitise archival assets, 3D scan living buildings, and design and populate a new and immersive online Shoei Yoh Archive.
This exhibition celebrated the launch of the online Shoei Yoh Archive. It traced a trajectory of Yoh's experimental design practice across 5 buildings completed between 1979 to 1994 including the Kinoshita Clinic (1979), Music Atelier (1986), Oguni Bus Terminal (1986), Oguni Dome (1988) and the Naiju Community Centre (1994). 2 views
Books by Nicole Gardner
Scaling the Smart City: The Design and Ethics of Urban Technology, 2024
Scaling the Smart City engages with the smart city as a problem of scale. It disentangles the sma... more Scaling the Smart City engages with the smart city as a problem of scale. It disentangles the smart city from its corporate and technocratic stronghold by presenting an accessible design framework that productively aligns philosophical thinking on technology with foundational technical understandings of urban technology and smart system design.
Computational Design: From Promise to Practice, 2019
INTERCHANGING brings together a collection of design
projects and interdisciplinary perspectives ... more INTERCHANGING brings together a collection of design
projects and interdisciplinary perspectives on policy,
planning, design, and management issues that currently
– and are set to – shape and influence our expectations
and experiences of urban public transport environments.
With consideration of a range of social trends, but also
emerging responsive and sustainable technologies, the
essays and design projects presented here reimagine, in
various ways, a public transport Interchange of the Future
better suited to address the complexities and conditions
of 21st century urban digital life.
INFOSTRUCTURE presents the vision of interactive and responsive urban public transport environmen... more INFOSTRUCTURE presents the vision of interactive and responsive urban public transport environments where new forms of communication and information access are enabled through an overlay of urban digital media technologies. Featuring research and projects undertaken by master students in architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney and Bachelor students in design computing at the University of Sydney, the book explores the augmentation of existing public transport environments with urban digital media technologies, to set in motion a transformation from infrastructure to 'infostructure(s).' Precedent based research and technology investigations underpin the twenty featured student projects, that address a nexus of space, urban media, sensor, and mobile phone technology. The research presented in this book is a foundation for a series of future infostructure projects.
Journal Article by Nicole Gardner
Frontiers in the Built Environment , 2022
The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is negotiating a slow and fragment... more The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is negotiating a slow and fragmented shift toward digital transformation (DT). To identify the drivers and barriers to DT in the AEC industry, this article draws on organizational learning theory. More specifically, it investigates learning dynamics related to digital technology knowledge and skills development in organizations in the architecture sector. Adopting an empirical approach, the research has collected data through a series of semi-structured interviews (n = 17) with employees from four large-scale architecture organizations in Sydney, Australia. The article conceptualizes the interviewees’ experiences of engaging with digital technology knowledge and skills in their workplace along a learning loop continuum and in relation to modes of single-, double-, and triple-loop learning. It finds that organizations are primarily fostering modes of single-loop learning and potentially missing opportunities to innovate. The research highlights the hybrid, extensible, and platform nature by which individuals “learn” digital technologies and computational systems in the architecture workplace and identifies opportunities for intervention. The research demonstrates the utility of organizational learning as a method to rethink approaches to DT in the AEC industry.
Digital Transformation in the Australian AEC Industry: Prevailing Issues and Prospective Leadership Thinking
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
(Computationally) designing out waste: Developing a computational design workflow for minimising construction and demolition waste in early-stage architectural design
International Journal of Architectural Computing
In the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, waste is oft framed as an econo... more In the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, waste is oft framed as an economic problem typically addressed in a building’s construction and demolition phase. Yet, architectural design decision-making can significantly determine construction waste outcomes. Following the logic of zero waste, this research addresses waste minimisation ‘at the source’. By resituating the problem of construction waste within the architectural design process, the research explores waste as a data and informational problem in a design system. Accordingly, this article outlines the creation of an integrated computational design decision support waste tool that employs a novel data structure combining HTML-scraped material data and historic building information modelling (BIM) data to generate waste evaluations in a browser-based 3D modelling platform. Designing an accessible construction waste tool for use by architects and designers aims to heighten awareness of the waste implication...
Feminist Review, 2019
As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informa... more As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informational systems, this demands new skills, competencies and commitments. Informed by the findings of an online survey, this article explores how, who and to what extent those in the profession of architecture are investing in technology knowledge and skills, and under what material conditions this occurs. Survey data collected from five large-scale architecture practices in Sydney, Australia finds that while technology-related skills are highly valued in the profession, more men than women are engaging with computationally intensive software and technology skills building remains a largely unstructured and often self-directed enterprise. Drawing on feminist technology studies and digital labour perspectives, it is argued that the drive to computationalise the profession of architecture rests heavily on discretionary, aspirational and invisible labour practices that disadvantage employees with lesser reserves of economic and social capital, and particularly women. This further contributes to revealing neo-liberalism’s influence on the concrete practices of the architecture workplace and highlights how the diminished structural role of employers breeds uneven opportunities and inequitable working conditions.
International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2019
Despite the relative accessibility of clay, its low cost and reputation as a robust and sustainab... more Despite the relative accessibility of clay, its low cost and reputation as a robust and sustainable building material, clay three-dimensional printing remains an under-utilized digital fabrication technique in the production of architectural artefacts. Given this, numerous research projects have sought to extend the viability of clay three-dimensional digital fabrication by streamlining and automating workflows through computational methods and robotic technologies in ways that afford agency to the digital and machinic processes over human bodily skill. Three-dimensional printed clay has also gained prominence as a resilient material well suited to the design and fabrication of artificial reef and habitatenhancing seawall structures for coastal marine environments depleted and disrupted by human activity, climate change and pollution. Still, these projects face similar challenges when three-dimensional printing complex forms from the highly plastic and somewhat unpredictable feed material of clay. In response, this article outlines a research project that seeks to improve the translation of complex geometries into physical clay artefacts through additive three dimensional printing processes by drawing on the notion of digital craft and giving focus to human–machine interaction as a collaborative practice. Through the case study of the 1:1 scale fabrication of a computationally generated bio-reef structure using clay as a feed material and a readily available Delta Potterbot XLS-2 ceramic printer, the research project documents how, by exploiting the human ability to intuitively handle clay and adapt, and the machine’s ability to work efficiently and with precision, humans and machines can fabricate together. With the urgent need to develop more sustainable building practices and materials, this research contributes valuable knowledge of hybrid fabrication processes towards extending the accessibility and viability of clay three-dimensional printing as a resilient material and fabrication system.
City, Culture and Society, 2018
The ‘smart city’ is an oft-cited techno-urban imaginary promoted by businesses and governments al... more The ‘smart city’ is an oft-cited techno-urban imaginary promoted by businesses and governments alike. It thinks big, and is chiefly imagined in terms of large-scale information communications systems that hinge on the collection of real-time and so-called ‘big data’. Less talked about are the human-scale implications and user experience of the smart city. Much of the current academic scholarship on smart cities offers synoptic and technical perspectives, leaving the users of smart systems curiously unaccounted for. While they purport to empower citizens, smart cities initiatives are rarely focused at the citizen-scale, nor do they necessarily attend to the ways initiatives can be user-led or co-designed. Drawing on the outcomes of a university studio, this article rethinks the smart city as a series of urban scales—metropolis, community, individual, and personal—and proposes an analytical model for classifying smart city initiatives in terms of engagement. Informed by the theory of proxemics, the model proposed analyses smart city initiatives in terms of the scope of their features and audience size; the actors accountable for their deployment and maintenance; their spatial reach; and the ability of design solutions to re-shape and adapt to different urban scenarios and precincts. We argue that the significance of this model lies in its potential to facilitate modes of thinking across and between scales in ways that can gauge the levels of involvement in the design of digitally mediated urban environments, and productively re-situate citizens as central to the design of smart city initiatives.
Editorial by Nicole Gardner
http://architecture.com.au/docs/default-source/act-notable-buildings/spring.pdf?sfvrsn=0
Papers by Nicole Gardner
Blucher Design Proceedings, Dec 1, 2019
This research explores how to improve the opportunities for augmented reality technologies as a d... more This research explores how to improve the opportunities for augmented reality technologies as a design communication tool, through developing criteria to test user interface and user experience in an interior design context. The process involves the development of three conceptual user interfaces created using Adobe Experience Design CC (Beta) 2017, and a simulated experience through the InvisionApp platform. The software was chosen on the basis that they are quick prototyping tools to adhere to time constraints. By testing prototypes against a series of customised heuristics, this research can reflect on ways to design MAR interfaces for use in the design industry. Heuristics refers to an existing technique of evaluating application effectiveness following a set criteria. Due to the general nature of heuristics, it is important to define a set that is unique to the project objectives (Nielsen, 1994). By designing and testing the user interfaces with 15 participants from PTW Architects targeting the appropriate demographic, this study outlines strategies of effective mobile augmented reality user interface design, and explores methods of measuring application effectiveness. The experiment uses inspection methods to better understand how to apply heuristic evaluation with appropriate consideration of the iterative design process.
Front Matter - Volume 2
Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) [Volume 2], 2022
Drawing Recognition - Integrating Machine Learning Systems into Architectural Design Workflows
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe) [Volume 2]
CAADRIA proceedings
Generative design (GD) is the process of defining high-level goals and constraints and then using... more Generative design (GD) is the process of defining high-level goals and constraints and then using computation to automatically explore a range of solutions that meet the desired requirements. Generative processes are intelligent ways to fast-track early design stages. The outcomes are analyzed simultaneously to inform decisions for architects and engineers. Whilst material properties have been defined as a driving agent within generative systems to calculate structure, material performance or structural capacity are not linked with early decision-making. In response, this paper sets a constrained approach upon traditional and non-traditional materials to validate the feasibility of structures. A GD tool is developed within Grasshopper using C-sharp, Karamaba3D, Galapagos and various engineering formulas. The result is a script, which prioritizes the structural qualities of material as a driving factor within generative systems and facilitates communication across different expertise.
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe) [Volume 2], 2022
Building Code Compliance Checking (CCC) is a necessary part of the design process in the Architec... more Building Code Compliance Checking (CCC) is a necessary part of the design process in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry that is typically time consuming. Existing Automated Code Compliance Checking (ACCC) solutions can be considered as 'Blackbox' and are often location specific. Using action research methodology this research develops the design of the computational workflow led by an 'informed research participant'-an industry partner-who has knowledge of the problem. All to create a visible and customizable script to evaluate model compliance as well as CCC results. The research outcomes demonstrate a promising compliance checking computational workflow method that could be applied to a range of building codes and standards and contributes to building the AEC industry's confidence in workflow automation to drive more productive and sustainable ways of working. This investigation, its proposed hypothesis, methodology, implications, significance, and evaluation are presented in the paper.
Feminist Review, 2019
As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informa... more As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informational systems, this demands new skills, competencies and commitments. Informed by the findings of an online survey, this article explores how, who and to what extent those in the profession of architecture are investing in technology knowledge and skills, and under what material conditions this occurs. Survey data collected from five large-scale architecture practices in Sydney, Australia finds that while technology-related skills are highly valued in the profession, more men than women are engaging with computationally intensive software and technology skills building remains a largely unstructured and often self-directed enterprise. Drawing on feminist technology studies and digital labour perspectives, it is argued that the drive to computationalise the profession of architecture rests heavily on discretionary, aspirational and invisible labour practices that disadvantage employees w...
eCAADe proceedings
Understanding how people circulate in a space is crucial to effective spatial organisation. Howev... more Understanding how people circulate in a space is crucial to effective spatial organisation. However, while many studies focus on wayfinding within environments such as train stations, there are few discussing multi-storey circulation and pathfinding within educational institutions. Vertical high schools prefer multiple stairways over elevators, and seek to devote the maximum floor area possible to learning spaces. These considerations impact a student's ability to quickly traverse multiple floors. In this research, a computational tool is designed to simulate and assess circulation efficiency within a vertical high school with the goal of lightening stairwell congestion and decreasing classroom transit times. Using action research methodology, the research problem was formulated in cooperation with the industry partner, TERROIR, and solved in an iterative manner. As a method to assess spatial circulation performance, principles of graph theory were applied to a simplified navigation mesh derived from the high school's floor plan and timetable using Grasshopper. The ability to understand the influence of a designer's decisions on circulation efficiency factors such as travel time and congestion is vital to creating practical and enduring designs that avoid expensive, post-construction building alterations to fix emergent problems-a core contribution of this research. While the simulation designed in this research engages with a vertical high school context, it could be appropriated for other building types, such as offices or shopping centres.
Revisiting Shoei Yoh: Developing a Workflow for a Browser-Based 3D Model Environment to Create an Immersive Digital Archive
CAADRIA proceedings
Japan Institute of Architects, 2019
Computational processes are fast becoming central to the production of work across numerous indus... more Computational processes are fast becoming central to the production of work across numerous industries in ways that are shifting workplace practices, as well as the relevance, identity, and value proposition of established professions. In the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry globally, the uptake of digital and computing technologies is ushering in significant changes to long-standing ways of designing, delivering, and constructing the built environment. While architecture has long been computerized, having enrolled computing for administrative tasks and computer-aided design (CAD) software for documentation and representation since the 1980s, it is now negotiating a significant intersection with computer science logic and methods. It is a timely moment then to revisit the work of Japanese architect Shoei Yoh who, from the late 1980s onwards, forged a less-instrumentalist and more collaborative relationship with emerging computing technology. The re-examination of this not-too-distant architectural past is argued here as an important way to advance a critical reconceptualization of architecture’s relationship to technology.
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Videos by Nicole Gardner
This exhibition celebrated the launch of the online Shoei Yoh Archive. It traced a trajectory of Yoh's experimental design practice across 5 buildings completed between 1979 to 1994 including the Kinoshita Clinic (1979), Music Atelier (1986), Oguni Bus Terminal (1986), Oguni Dome (1988) and the Naiju Community Centre (1994).
Books by Nicole Gardner
projects and interdisciplinary perspectives on policy,
planning, design, and management issues that currently
– and are set to – shape and influence our expectations
and experiences of urban public transport environments.
With consideration of a range of social trends, but also
emerging responsive and sustainable technologies, the
essays and design projects presented here reimagine, in
various ways, a public transport Interchange of the Future
better suited to address the complexities and conditions
of 21st century urban digital life.
Journal Article by Nicole Gardner
Editorial by Nicole Gardner
Papers by Nicole Gardner