Designers, planners and builders need to radically change how we work. So what does this mean for your future in the industry?
Our built and living environment is at the heart of how we interact with each other and the world around us. Not only does our industry impact social justice, public health, ageing populations, and technological transformation, but perhaps most urgently our contribution to the climate and biodiversity crises. Global challenges like these need global solutions. Innovative ideas that revolutionise our practices and perspectives to create systemic change.
Great challenges call for great minds, making this an exciting time for graduates entering the industry.
Australia has not been spared from these challenges. Recent research by Climate Analytics found that Australian fossil fuel exports rank second only to Russia for climate damage, with ‘no plan’ for reduction. In 2024, the Australian Government approved the expansion of three giant mines and issued nine permits for further gas exploration. Meanwhile, we have the largest amount of domestic rooftop solar globally, per capita, yet these roofs sit on the world’s largest and least climate-friendly houses. The lack of small and medium-sized homes in our profit-driven housing market has made home ownership not only a social justice issue, but a public health issue, too. Our car dependency continues unabated, as if our urban planning and policymaking is asleep at the wheel. The Australia Institute describes how our national obsession with “big dumb cars”, like oversized SUVs, leads to people spending billions more on fuel than they need to. They also make our streets and neighbourhoods increasingly unsafe and unhealthy for our most vulnerable populations, like young children.
All of this comes back to the way we imagine, discuss, design and manage our built and living environments.
Our systemic response
At Melbourne School of Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, we’re exploring how to design a better way to live. We’re equipping our graduates will the skills they need to take on this task.
In addition to research development and teaching, we are changing and integrating our approach to urban planning and design, landscape and property, architecture and construction, heritage and engineering. Our School is full of inspiring teachers. Researchers Rob Crawford, James Helal and André Stephan are building on their research into the lifecycles of buildings and their materials to help the construction sector stay within a carbon budget defined by planetary boundaries; or in other words, to honour the Paris Agreement that Australia has signed up to. To be clear, if we continue business-as-usual, we will have no carbon budget to make any new houses.
But there is no single, simple solution here, no ‘silver bullet’. You might call this an ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ strategy, recognising that a systemic challenge requires a systemic response.
So must we also transform our supply chains, exploring a rich diversity of biomaterials, as well as new ways of putting buildings together and taking them apart.
Students in some of our Master of Architecture studios, led by André Bonnice, now relocate temporarily to the University’s Dookie campus, a 2,440 hectare farm two hours north of Melbourne. Dookie is traditionally used for agricultural research rather than architectural design. But over the last year, Bonnice and students have been exploring the farm’s potential for a systemic reframing of agriculture and architecture, using old and new technologies alongside Indigenous and ‘Western’ methods.
Other Master of Architecture studios are exploring how we might rethink the size, form and organisation of the Australian home such that it meets the needs of people, place and planet rather than the property sector. By creating diverse and inclusive living spaces and places, made of healthy, ‘circular’ materials, we can help unlock housing policy and move the industry towards reimagining and retrofitting the houses we already have. We also introduce our students to industry, government and community partners at every opportunity, combining real-world scenarios with studio teaching. For example, the City of Melbourne’s City Design team has been advising our Urban Design studios. Together, they’re discussing with students how they are dealing with flooding, heat islands, biodiversity, mobility technologies, futures of work, and shifting patterns of culture. Not only was this shared discussion instructive, but it also helped our students apply their knowledge to real-world problems.
In creating these various environments to learn within, we aim to inspire future practices not only for a school of design, but for design itself.
The way we design our everyday living environments embodies who we are and what we stand for as a society. Design can help reveal and frame difficult societal and environmental questions but also generate and explore possible futures. Designers make ideas tangible, so that they can be imagined, discussed, tested, adopted and adapted. Ultimately, design must be a humble trade—but perhaps these small experiments might create built and living environments that help us all, human and non-human, to thrive and flourish together.
Professor Dan Hill is a designer, urbanist, educator and experienced leader at the intersection of design, technology and cities. He is the Director of the Melbourne School of Design in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.