Pia Ednie-Brown, Mock-up for a latex skin

installation, Melbourne, 2003

top centre: This latex skin was painted onto
and peeled off a tiled shower recess. It was
produced as part of the experimentation and
mock-up process for an interaction installation
then under development.

Mark Burry, The Third Policeman, Black

Air, 1998/2010
top left: From Mark Burry, Scripting
Cultures, Architectural Design and
Programming, John Wiley & Sons
(London), 2010.
Antoni Gaud, Sagrada Famlia Basilica,
Barcelona, 1882
above: Horizontal section across a window
design, 1980. Drawing by Mark Burry.

Pia Ednie-Brown, Plastic Futures, State of

Design Festival, Melbourne, 2009
top right: Plastic Futures explored the
intersections of bio-art and contemporary
field-based design practices in the context of
speculative futures.Working with a group of
RMIT postgraduate architecture and fashion
students, the project included a workshop at
SymbioticA (University of Western Australia) and
the site of Lake Clifton inWestern Australia,
where biotechnical laboratory processes, ancient
biological histories and contemporary planning
and conservation problems were explored. The
workshop informed and inflected the production
of an ethically loaded speculative future scenario
for the exhibition and installation in Melbourne.

Andrew Burrow, Diagram of a rooted

oriented graph, 2011
above top: The oriented and rooted graph
proved to be a strong model for navigation
in collaboratively edited hypertexts at SIAL.
In this small fragment, the roots are the
nodes with no inward-pointing edges; they
represent entry points in a shared text,
but these are not walled gardens, as many
nodes are reachable from either root node.

Andrew Burrow, Snapshot of albCorpus

wiki, 2009
above bottom:The dense interconnections
of a hypertext comprehensively recording
digital work practices during a period of
intense software development.

about the guest-editors

Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry
and Andrew Burrow

Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry and Andrew Burrow are founding members of the Spatial
Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) in the School of Architecture and Design at
RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. They have led the establishment of a holistic
spatial design research environment dedicated to almost all aspects of contemporary spatial
design activity, a facility for innovation in transdisciplinary design research and education.
SIAL embraces a broad range of investigative modes, involving both highly speculative
and industry-linked projects. Researchers are engaged in a wide variety of projects that
collaboratively disturb artificial distinctions between the physical and virtual, digital and
analogue, scientific and artistic, instrumental and philosophical.
This issue of 3 is an outcome of a research project supported by the Australian
Research Council (200911). The project sought to re-theorise innovation for contemporary
design practices in terms of coupled ethical and aesthetic concerns therein, focusing on
case studies from digital architecture, the biological arts and their intersections. Chief
investigators were Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry, Andrew Burrow and Oron Catts of
SymbioticA.
Pia Ednie-Brown is a designer, theorist and educator with creative research practice
Onomatopoeia. She is an associate professor at RMIT University, based in both the
Architecture programmeand SIAL. Her doctoral research, The Aesthetics of Emergence
(2007) articulated new ways of understanding architectural composition in the context
of processually and behaviourally oriented creative production. Her research continues to
explore the implications of new technologies in design, relations between composition,
diagramming, embodiment and affect, and ethics and aesthetics. Her book Plastic Green:
Designing for Environmental Transformation (RMIT University Press, 2009) is an outcome
of one of her creative research projects involving multiple disciplines across the arts and
science. Recent creative projects have included Plastic Futures, exhibited at the Victoria State
of Design Festival (2009) and Change Room at the 2012 Biennale of Sydney as part of Erin
Mannings participatory work, Stitching Time.
Professor Mark Burry has published internationally on three main themes: the life and
work of the architect Antoni Gaud in Barcelona, putting theory into practice with regard to
challenging architecture, and transdisciplinary design education and practice. His research
focuses on the broader issues of design, construction and the use of computers in design
theory and practice. He is the founding director of RMIT Universitys Design Research
Institute (DRI) and SIAL. The DRI positions the role of design research as an explorer and
tester of design options focusing on the challenges of urbanisation and growing cities of
the future. Since 1979, Burry has been a key member of the Sagrada Famlia Basilica design
team based on site in Barcelona. For over three decades he has been helping untangle the
mysteries of Gauds compositional strategies for his greatest work in order to inform the
ongoing construction.
Andrew Burrow is a senior research fellow at SIAL. His research interests concern
computational accounts in design. He has completed a PhD on the subject, demonstrating
the foundational algorithms for a class of design-space explorers that operate over
information orderings. Recognising that the social context of the designer is crucial to
computer-aided design, he has also worked on tools to negotiate access to resources to assist
in the early stages of team development, and to explicitly consider the performative aspects
of communication. His current research concerns collective map-building as a means to
negotiate representations of expertise. 1

Text 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6(tl) model: Mark Burry, scripting support: James Wojtek Goscinski, render: James Loader; pp
6(bl), 7(c) Mark Burry; pp 6(tc&tr), 7(t) Pia Ednie- Brown; pp 6(br), 7(b) Andrew Burrow