Designing a creative urban future

For the first three years, students study their standard UTS degree during the semester and complete their BCII subjects during summer and winter schools. In the fourth and final year, they explore internships and other practical opportunities that draw on the entirety of their creative intelligence learning.

For Awkar, that fourth year included internships with Google’s creative think tank, Google Zoo, and with AMP.  

“I think one of the reasons I managed to land both those internships is that the BCII prepares you to operate at the edge of what’s possible,” he says.

At Google Zoo, he worked on a challenge specific to a new Google product, although the details remain protected by an NDA. The AMP experience was more of a traditional internship, shadowing senior members of the company’s innovation team and getting a feel for what an innovation career might look like.

In both settings, Awkar could see the impact of his creative intelligence capabilities on real-world work.

Transforming urban spaces

Though he was learning to push the boundaries of creativity, at the time, Awkar didn’t necessarily see how the BCII would support his future architectural career. As an undergraduate student, he didn’t think about it too much – he was having fun, studying something he was passionate about, and was on track to progress into his dream career.

But once he was out in the world of work, the impact and relevance of the BCII became clear. For the last seven years, he’s worked at international architecture firm Grimshaw, first as a graduate, then as a designer, and now as a registered architect. In that time, he’s worked on major projects like Sydney Metro West; in 2025, he temporarily relocated to Perth to help deliver a new science building at Curtin University.

Even in the early days of his post-UTS life, Awkar had a sense that the skills he brought to his professional practice didn’t start and stop with drawing and design. The methodologies he’d learnt in the BCII kept showing up in his practice, from rapid brainstorming and iterating through to transdisciplinary communication and the ability to take on feedback from a place of curiosity, rather than defensiveness.

“It’s not always super evident that I’m using a specific BCII methodology to approach a problem, but I think having gone through a degree that’s all about being agile and being able to work under pressure while simultaneously being creative has translated, in an indirect way, into how I work on my projects at Grimshaw,” he says.

“Architecture comes with its own design methodologies and its own ways of thinking and drawing and modelling, but I think the BCII complements it a lot.”  

But what really makes him stand out, he says, is his ability to bring people together. Collaboration is a hallmark of the BCII, in which students come together in transdisciplinary combinations to solve problems of every kind.

And, as it turns out, it’s a hallmark of the architecture profession, too. Architectural projects can involve everyone from developers to engineers, designers to surveyors, construction managers to tradespeople. Being able to find common ground among all these stakeholders is essential to shared success.  

“I’m not a traditional architect in the sense of just designing, drafting and delivering ideas. I can also be empathetic with other people’s perspectives and discipline and step up as the mediator or facilitator, helping to foster conversations that often led to unexpectedly creative outcomes,” says Awkar, who now draws on those skills to mentor students as part of the BUILD program at the Sydney Opera House.

“When you’re dealing with people from different disciplines and backgrounds, being able to deploy this kind of empathy has been lifechanging for me in my career and my approach to design.”