Extra EBD Hub information

By mid June the work of the VEIL team will be used to formulate design studios in Architecture, industrial design, service design, landscape and urban design, visual communication and multimedia. By the end of the year there will a large and diverse body of work from talented students across the four universities which will extend the vision of what could be a future for EGate.

VicUrban has expressed interest in sponsoring a large and highly public exhibition of the best of that student work and the VEIL exploration.

The aim is to influence future thinking about the site and even, perhaps, to garner enough support to see the implementation of a future development  unlike any seen before in Melbourne.

The VEIL process involves developing a ‘retrospective history of the next 25 years’. In an extract from “Melbourne 2032 – Looking Back”  the new EGate development is described in the following way:

“In 2009, eager to stimulate significant innovation, the Victorian government decided to build on the success of some innovative commercial buildings that set new standards for energy and water consumption. Individual buildings (such as the Melbourne City’s Council House – CH2, which opened in 2006) were a powerful demonstration of the power of the ‘icon effect’ in driving socio-technical change. The design, construction and then the living presence of an innovative development stood as the physical embodiment of new possibilities against which future developments then became measured. Government interest was in expanding the scope of such development so that it would to encompass all the systems, infrastructure, culture and ‘spirit’ of a complex urban community, with high quality of life and desirable conditions but with a revolutionary break from past patterns of consumption.

An impending development site close to the Centre of Melbourne (originally know as ‘EGate’) was set aside as a visionary new test-bed of social and technical innovation in a living and working, a ‘future city within the city’, a focus for:

“the best of Victorian design and innovation, in residential and commercial building, in services and infrastructure, in the delivery and utilisation of water, energy, food and transport suited to a zerocarbon future.”

As a centre-piece of this new development the federal and state governments established a new institution – The Australian Centre for Urban Resilience – which, in part, took the surrounding living neighbourhood as its laboratory. In this way it expanded its role as a research and education institute to one of community engagement and support, encouraging local experimentation and evaluation and acting as an information hub to disseminate results.”

A community workshop, for representatives of the stakeholders, is being planned for the afternoon of the 4th June to extend the thinking before the VEIL atelier. It is hoped that this afternoon workshop will open up possibilities for involvement of academic staff in the design schools beyond the seconded staff. (For this coming atelier , the University of Melbourne is represented by Sidh Sintusingha.)

VEIL, a Melbourne University program aimed at stimulating social, technical and infrastructure innovation in the face of the challenges of climate change, has focused on creating 25 year visions for a sustainable Victoria. VEIL has as partners the design schools of four universities, Monash, RMIT, Swinburne, as well as Melbourne.  VEIL ‘seconds’ design academics from four universities into a ‘future think-tank’ to work with sustainability researchers from government, industry and research groups. The work of the think tank is then amplified by a co-ordinated program of design studios for later year students in each university.