POLITICS OF WATER



SIAL Team:
    Mark Burry
    Dominik Holzer
    Mark Taylor


Upper Pool Design Studio | Studio Coordinators:
Prof. Mark Burry, Dominik Holzer, Malte Wagenfeld, Mark Taylor

Links: Procedures | Schedules | Water Pages


Course Details
This is a Design Studio giving equal emphasis to architecture and industrial design. The course is coordinated at RMIT by Prof. Mark Burry, Dominik Holzer and Malte Wagenfeld and at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane by Mark Taylor.

Lectures and studio sessions will take place every week in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) located on level 2 in Building 9; on Thursdays between 6:00 pm and 09:30 pm. Participants will have access to work in the SIAL student laboratory in Building 8, level 8 room 44 and can book time in the SIAL modelling workshop in building 9.

The course is open to upper pool architecture and year 3 industrial design students.


Introduction
Of all the continents, Australia is the second driest. Whilst not suffering the full effects of severe water shortage, such as famine, the country suffers at least economically from cyclical drought. This lack of water predominantly affects the rural sector, but may lead to city-wide rationing. As one of the world’s most urbanised countries, the severe effects beyond the metropolitan areas may be manifested only marginally within. Whereas farm stock has to be sold off at a fraction of their value or slaughtered as a consequence of water shortage in one domain, the affects in the other might be to impose restrictions on how much water may be squandered irrigating exotic plants in suburban gardens.
National water management is not necessarily the primary interest of the designer, but an awareness of important issues such as quality and abundance (or scarcity) can be.

Design and politics and the social climate (weltanschauung) have always had a very strong if often overlooked or little understood relationship. The designed object, be it an appliance or a building, is highly charged with signifying qualities, packed with messages, meanings, values, desires, and politics. These signifying qualities are often so familiar that they become invisible or obscured. However, if almost any designed object is looked at closely, why and for whom it was designed, its form and material, colour and texture analysed, it will be discovered that not only does it reveal something about itself, but equally something about the society which created it. Design does not travel along some theoretical evolutionary timeline of quantifiable visual progression and technical improvement. Changes in design are much more profoundly linked to changes in the socio-cultural and political context than to technological and scientific developments. What we may consider relevant and contemporary at a given time context (i.e. 2004) relates to how we as a society view the world, what are our fears and aspirations, our fascinations, desires and values.

Water is increasingly being referred to as the oil of the 21st century. How will this affect design? How will this affect our relationship and sensibility to water? Will this make us respect and honour water? Or will it, as citizens of the “1st world” make us more abusive and wasteful with water as a primal act of proving our economic and military superiority.


This project provides students with the opportunity to:

• register through project-based design their position on the politics of water sourcing, treatment, and supply

• explore their sensibility to water both in terms of its physical nature as well as its intangible and sometimes elusive qualities as a ‘medium’.

• Record and represent some aspect of water through physical and digital modelling

• Develop a design project that demonstrates one of either: scarcity and abuse, purity and contamination, or sensuality and aesthetics of water in relation to the body.

This project also offers a powerful opportunity for industrial design and Architecture students to interchange ideas and learn from each other. Although Industrial design and architecture often share a similar design language and architects may at times also work as industrial designers and vice-versa, the two disciplines often engage in a different design methodology. This methodology relates to differences in scale, production quantities and processes, engagement and uptake of new technology, project timescales, end-users, etc. This project proposes to exchange and interchange these methodologies at various stages as a design methodology in-itself.