Because we understand that design both constructs and interprets the world, we are engaged in making and re-making buildings, systems, fashions, and art and media, and contribute to discourse about the design of our world and the systems that shape our cities.
News and projects
Designing the future of refuge accommodation
Samantha Donnelly
For women and children leaving domestic and family violence, refuges are safe places to land — but with clever, responsive, human-centred design, they can also play a vital role in recovery.
Photo: Matthew Darmour-Paul, Author provided
Remaking our suburbs’ 1960s apartment blocks
Urtzi Grau
Ageing brick apartment buildings of two to three storeys are being redeveloped in many suburbs. Typically, they are knocked down to be replaced by much bigger developments. But here’s an alternative.
Photo Jacquie Manning
New UTS Artist in Residence
Associate Professor Timo Rissanen
DAB will host the 2022 UTS Artist in Residence, Sydney-based practitioner HOSSEIN, who will be working closely with Associate Professor Timo Rissanen to explore explores concepts of healing through meditative ritual, performance and costume.
UTS, Indigenous artists and Breville in design partnership
Alison Page
Professor Alison Page has recently collaborated with global appliance maker Breville, resulting in a world-first partnership between First Nations People and the National Museum of Australia.
The Break with the Past
Deborah Barnstone
A comprehensive study of the relationship between individual war experience of German interwar avant-garde architects and their influence on post-war artistic practice, theory, and arts education.
Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour
Jesse Stein
Hot Metal illuminates connections between design, material culture and labour between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the traditional crafts of hot-metal typesetting and letterpress were finally made obsolete with the introduction of computerised technologies.
Model as Performance
Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen
The Model as Performance investigates the history and development of the scale model from the Renaissance to the present, providing a comprehensive historical context and theoretical framework for theatre scholars, scenographers, artists and architects interested in the model's reality-producing capacity. Image courtesy Lawrence Sass.
Penguin Parade Visitors Centre
Gerard Reinmuth
An award-winning visitors centre in the Phillip Island Important Bird Area, comprising visitor facilities, retail and hospitality spaces, a theatre and interpretation space and a science centre, while balancing conservation and eco-tourism needs.
Pretty Gentlemen
Peter McNeil
This illustrated book devoted to notable 18th-century British male fashion brings together dress, biography, and historical events with the broader visual and material culture of the late 18th century.
Teatro Della Terra Alienata (Theatre of the Alienated Land)
Amaia Sanchez-Velasco et. al
Created for the Australian Pavilion at the 2019 Triennale di Milano, Teatro Della Terra Alienata is a multi-media installation which responds to the recent mass coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef, and was awarded the Triennale di Milano’s highest honour, the Golden Bee.
Urban Interiors
Charles Rice
This ARC funded project uses a series of case studies and thematic analyses to examine how and why interiors such as transport interchanges, vast commercial lobbies, shopping malls and the atriums of hotels and museums have increasingly shaped cities globally since the 1960s.
Research degrees in Design, Architecture and Building
Partner with DAB Research
We collaborate on a wide range of research projects for government and industry partners.