Swayn Open Research

The Alastair Swayn Foundation is committed to information sharing and transparency of the research it funds. We believe that research supported by the Foundation should be made discoverable and readily accessible online. The Swayn Open Research repository provides a place for researchers to promptly have their findings published on an open access basis, to benefit the architecture and design community.

Category
Year
Design Thinking Tim Fulton Design Thinking Tim Fulton

Developing Spatial Design Know How with and for Young People Living in Out-of-Home Residential Care

Bringing spatial design and lived experience together in dialogue, the project focused on the environment of residential care in relation to questions of belonging and ‘home’. The aim of this project is to develop a shared understanding of spatial design know-how that can be used by young people currently living in residential care.

Read More
Strategic Grant Tim Fulton Strategic Grant Tim Fulton

Phycoforms: Building the Future with Seaweed

Phycoforms was created to explore the potential of utilizing biofouled content from the seaweed farming process to create rigid compressible seaweed biocomposites for the building industry. This material system exploration looks into the unique properties of alginate present in brown seaweed and how this can be utilized to make more resilient and fire-retardant building materials.

Read More
Strategic Grant Tim Fulton Strategic Grant Tim Fulton

Supporting Social-Capital in an Omni-Channel Workforce: Findings from an adaptive workplace pilot

This case study reports findings from Mirvac’s Adaptive Workplace Pilot, an experimental work floor within the company’s Sydney CBD office designed to test spaces and tools most effective in supporting seamless hybrid work. The pilot targeted challenges of human connection, knowledge exchange, and community in a hybrid workforce, with observations, focus groups and utilisation measurements conducted from May to September 2022.

Read More
Master Research Grant Tim Fulton Master Research Grant Tim Fulton

Interface: Cemetery and City

This paper looks at the contribution of cemeteries and death spaces to the city and the living and the future of our death planning in Canberra. To understand the contribution of cemeteries to the living, case studies of the size, location, and age of cemeteries in Canberra, Sydney, Edinburgh, Oslo, and Washington are mapped and compared.

Read More
Master Research Grant Tim Fulton Master Research Grant Tim Fulton

Built Forms on Ngunnawal Country: Investigation and Adaptation

Traditionally, throughout white Australian history, the built environment has been used as a tool for colonisation. From the first colonials on Australian soil to modern day Australia, the built environment has been expanding its territory, resulting in the continued displacement, and forced assimilation of First Nations people in Western cultures.

Read More
Strategic Grant Tim Fulton Strategic Grant Tim Fulton

Workplace Plasticity: Furnishing the Net-Zero Office through Robotic Fabrication

The high turnover of Australia’s commercial office space represents an often overlooked component of the built environment’s ecological footprint. Drawing upon circular-design strategies, Workplace Plasticity offers an approach to the design and fabrication of common workplace elements using recyclable Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol (PETG) plastic.

Read More
Strategic Grant Tim Fulton Strategic Grant Tim Fulton

Designing Better, Not Bigger: Dynamic Architecture through Scalable Modular Systems

The project looks to improve sustainability and affordability for first home buyers, affordable housing clients and marginalised demographics, contributing towards establishing additional pathways towards property ownership for low to middle income earners. It provides a dwelling type that has the flexibility to change as the circumstances and expectations of the residents evolve.

Read More
Research Grant Tim Fulton Research Grant Tim Fulton

Interlude: A series of conversations exploring the recent transformations in architectural education

Interlude is a live archive—a snapshot of unfolding or unfinished conversations, experiments, stories, questions and reflections—exploring the current shifting state of architectural education; where architecture schools are navigating the tension between operating in a pandemic context whilst continuing to address what requires urgent attention today.

Read More
Alastair Swayn Internship Tim Fulton Alastair Swayn Internship Tim Fulton

Suburban Heat: An Examination of the Urban Heat Island Effect in Canberra, through an In-Depth Analysis of the Suburb of Wright and a Review of ACT Government Policy

In recent policy documents, the ACT government has identified increasing canopy cover as their primary response to the urban heat island effect. This research sought to understand how attainable the identified 30% canopy cover target was, particularly in Canberra’s newer existing suburbs, which have some of the lowest levels of canopy cover in the city.

Read More