Hands-On Design

Students from Years 9 to 10 engage in creative, interactive activities exploring design principles and problem-solving across specialisations. Workshops cover areas like architecture, user experience, landscape design, construction, urban planning, property, and visual and performance design, highlighting design's role in transforming spaces and experiences.

Workshops

The below workshops are available:

Form, Space, Materials & Mini Architecture

Explore how imaginative forms and spaces can emerge from unexpected materials in this fun, hands-on workshop. Students will design speculative "mini-architecture" inspired by familiar and fantastical ideas—like a friend’s house, a floating pool, or even an alien spaceship. Using materials such as bubble wrap, spaghetti, and marshmallows, students will experiment with creative techniques like crunching, wrapping, and gluing to bring their ideas to life.

Carditecture

This hands-on design workshop introduces students to the innovative design concepts of Charles and Ray Eames, offering a fun and practical way to explore architectural concepts through a series of creative challenges.

Engaging Place

This workshop is about ways of getting to know a place. Why? Because the ways in which we understand a place today—the vocabularies we use to describe its essential qualities—become the framework for our ideas about change. A designer’s first steps toward engaging a place are also her first steps toward ideas for its future.
The workshop will ask you to engage with sites around the campus Union Lawn in situ. (NB: you may work individually or in pairs.)

Unbroken Lines: A workshop on sketching without breaking the line

Ready to ignite your creativity? Challenge yourself to draw your partner without looking at the paper or lifting your pencil. All skill levels welcome for a memorable artistic exploration as well as a laugh or two.

MSD Robotics Lab

The Robotics Lab will demonstrate robotic clay 3D printing and multiaxial milling. Demonstrations will happen every 30 minutes throughout the day and technicians will be available to answer any questions.

Timber and Taste: Crafting custom chopsticks in a woodworking workshop

Finesse your woodworking skills and create a set of your very own custom chopsticks. Whatever your experience level, this hands-on workshop will enhance your craft and ignite your creativity. Workshops run for 45–60 minutes, max. 8–10 people.

From a Line to Align: Primary Tools in Architecture

While we know that architects “draw” (whether by hand or with the computer or other means), it is the particular mode of a “line” that is the main design/thinking/communication technology of an architect.  The line is nothing if not the marker of “differences”, whereby architecture is the materialisation of differences in the world, and it is the line that makes these differences evident.