The 12-week Work Integrated Learning (WIL) program challenged students to consider elements including pedagogy, placemaking, people movement and mixed reality technology, and use these to envisage what a future learning experience might be like in a hybrid physical and digital secondary school environment.
Sharing insights with students from our recently completed Wurun Senior Campus project, which provides an exemplar of senior secondary learning as students transition from school to tertiary education pathways or work, Paul Thatcher, GHD Design Director of Architecture said, “Education design is a focus area for us. We have a passion for creating educational spaces that provide interdisciplinary learning for 21st century skills.
Working in teams, students were given one of Melbourne’s Urban Renewal Precincts to provide rich context to the task.
“GHD Design shared many of their resources and specialists with the Design Studio students, which meant that we were engaging the students with an actual context. This allowed them to become really engaged with the complexities of the design scenario,” said Anthony Fryatt, RMIT Lecturer.
“Receiving the initial brief from GHD Design was great, it really started to challenge my thinking in different ways,” said Guanfeng Huang, Masters student.
“Beginning to understand the concept of student-centred learning, or self-autonomous learning, opposed to just considering the space in which learning is undertaken, in this case the secondary school, helped me to form a different point of view, and aided me in responding to the brief from a strategic perspective.”
Throughout the studio, our people engaged regularly with students to provide mentorship and guidance as they developed responses to the studio brief.
“The collaboration between GHD Design, our RMIT teachers and the students in our studio provided such a great opportunity to engage with people in the industry, share ideas and increase our awareness of industry issues,” said Huang.
“In addition to raising our profile as a leading architecture and design business and employer of choice for emerging design talent, we immediately benefited from the partnership," said Annelise Tiller, GHD Design Director of Architecture and Interior Design. “Held during one of Victoria’s COVID-19 lockdowns we had to adapt to a completely virtual platform. The studio gave us an opportunity to reflect on our own practice and we’ve developed our own methodologies for collaborating remotely as a result – this experience has reinforced our passion to innovate the future of learning.”
GHD Design is honoured to have been selected by RMIT, to help deliver this Design Studio. We are committed to educating the next generation of architects and designers and we’re planning another RMIT Design Studio partnership in 2022.
See full video here: Explore RMIT's Master of Interior Design collaboration with global design practice GHD Design
For more infomation, please contact:
Paul Thatcher
Director of Architecture
T: +61 3 8687 8383
M: +61 4 1312 5140
E: Paul Thatcher
Annelise Tiller
Director of Architecture & Interior Design
T: +61 3 8687 8689
E: Annelise Tiller
