Pushing the boundaries with Professor Martin Tomitsch

To be at the cutting edge means to take risks. I want to help create an environment that supports creativity and risk taking and enables students and academics to do their best and most impactful work.

– Professor Martin Tomitsch, Head of TD School

From a young age, Martin Tomitsch had an inquiring mind and was passionate about design, technology, the environment and sustainability.

Growing up in the pre-Alps region of Austria, he remembers being worried about the use of disposable ballpoint pens so he designed a series of sketches promoting the use of durable alternatives to the pens and distributed the sketches to his classmates:

‘Even in primary school, I was very conscious of the environmental impact of disposable goods and the impact of fossil fuels and I became focussed on the idea of promoting electric vehicles.’

Martin also developed a fascination with the digital layer of cities and his interests gradually coalesced in the study of urban environments and the best and most sustainable ways for humans to interact with technology.

After a five-year Masters degree in Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology and then a PhD, Martin says he discovered the field of media architecture while on a study exchange in Sydney:

‘I realised media architecture was combining all the things I was passionate about: the social, urban and digital layers of cities.’

After other exchanges in Reykjavik, Stockholm and Paris, Martin chose Sydney for what he thought would be an academic placement of three years.

That was 14 years ago and he’s covered a lot of ground since then.

As well as his teaching, Professor Tomitsch has published more than 100 academic articles and five books. He’s collaborated on installations for Sydney’s Vivid Festival and his broad research includes two ARC-funded Discovery Project grants looking at the interaction between humans and autonomous vehicles.

Recently, he’s also turned his mind to ‘life-centred design’ research which he says is a bit like coming full circle for him; back to the principles his parents used on their organic dairy farm where he grew up:

‘Our human life was pretty much determined by the need to ensure the well-being of all non-human life on the farm. Life-centred design attempts to bring this kind of thinking – how to consider all life, not just human life – to all businesses and sectors.’

There’s a stunning example of this in the facade design for a new high-rise building in New York City’s Nolita District.

Called the Monarch Sanctuary, it aims to create a habitat and breeding ground for the Monarch butterfly as it migrates from North America through to Central America. The greenery created will also provide human inhabitants of the building with a beautiful and natural outlook and Martin sees this as an important trend in design.

Professor Tomitsch leaves his University of Sydney roles as Professor of Interaction Design at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, and Director of Innovation at the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) to take up the TD School role.

It’s almost as though everything he’s done so far has served as a series of stepping stones leading to this new position - he sees his new colleagues and students as fellow innovators developing new knowledge and solutions, and finding new ways to make an impact.

He’s also excited about UTS’s ground-breaking decision to ensure that by 2025, all students will undertake a transdisciplinary elective as part of their UTS undergraduate degree.

Professor Tomitsch says universities have the responsibility to drive and speed up change and the TD School is at the cutting edge of this.

We no longer have the luxury of relying on the next generation to fix the problems we create today. We must connect and work with other faculties and other universities as well as industry and government to address the urgent complex issues of our time. Students who learn to push the boundaries and collaborate across disciplines will be the early adopters of this new way of studying, working and solving problems.

– Professor Martin Tomitsch