The postgraduate program is composed of Masters and Doctorates by Research in both project and thesis mode. The program is a space for investigation and experimentation into the production of interiors; it is dedicated to the possibilities of interior design as an emerging discipline concerned with interiors as spatial and temporal entities.
We offer a Master of Arts (interior Design) research degree and a PhD (Interior Design) research degree. Both offer an opportunity to conduct research from within the discipline and also trans-discipline. The postgraduate program attracts local and international students to create a vibrant collegial atmosphere for collaboration and exchange of ideas and practices across disciplines and cultures. Previous and current candidates have come from a range of disciplines including sculpture, film, theatre, journalism, visual arts cultural studies as well as interior design and architecture. Research to date has concentrated on the space of performance; film and video; digital technologies; sound and acoustics; museum and exhibition design; furniture design; interior design journalism; drawing practices; the city as an interior; visual arts and installation; postcolonial subjectivity; the history and theory of interior design. Cultural, ethical, political, social, historical, technological and formal dimensions of practice also shape the program. All candidates participate in the biannual Graduate Research Conference where they present their research-in-progress to a panel of peers.
PhD by Research
an interior history
Suzie Attiwill
This research project poses the idea of re-thinking the concept of interior – with particular reference to the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz. It responds to current forces that encourage the potential of other modes of production than that of enclosure, identification and reflection in the design of interiors. The driving force of this research in re-posing the concept of interior is to assemble a platform for new ways of working and thinking. An emphasis in this re-thinking is time and the actualisation of time through matter and its arrangement. History in this context can be approached as a practice – ‘as a particular set of actions brought to bear on a particular material’. In the making of an interior history, research is conducted through a method of curatorial practice and experiments are conducted in the exhibition environment. The research question continues to be – if one shifts from cartesian and phenomenological concepts of object/subject relations, then what kind of interiors become actualised?
Between Field and Form
Ross McLeod
The research considers the forces, rhythms, periodicies, vibrations and energy fields that shape the physical world and questions how these may be identified and understood in order to inform the act of design. Investigating design methodologies that address the perception of form, materiality, sound and light as complimentary wave like phenomena the projects seek to elicit perceptual resonances through the manipulation of archetypal, symbolic, geometrical, physical and phenomenal qualities.
The Spatial Implications of Stage Magic
Patricia Pringle
The emerging discipline of interior design is differentiated from interior decoration or architecture by its being a discipline of spatial performance and experience rather than one of composition or style. My research explores aspects of spatial consciousness through the study of optical, mechanical and psychological principles in classic 19th century stage illusions. These appear to manipulate space in a way which is literally 'fascinating'. I use the source material to identify both the practical mechanisms and also the inarticulate ideas, desires and uneasinesses of a spatial nature which they evoke, and which continue to reveal themselves in our contemporary spatial attraction to 'impossible' operations (such as dematerialising, defying gravity, changing form, becoming invisible).
Intimate Immensity
Andrea Mina
The possibilities of generating spatial discourse through an examination of the miniature
Sensory, spatial and social dynamics in interior architectural sites
Gabriele Knueppel
This research evolves around interrelations between sensory qualities in spatial design and social interaction.
Display Contexts and the Materiality of Interior Productions
Fiona Abicare
An inquiry into material processes within my art practice has acted alongside my career as a sculpting technician over the last nine years. These experiences inform the way I negotiate the presence of materiality and its display; the opportunity to re locate my practice within the Interior Design department has lead me further along the process of developing my own understanding. 'Display' has become an idea to which I am beginning to connect a wider set of relations. The term 'Interior Productions' has arisen from my efforts in describing the event of material effects which relates specifically to three environments bound by a common perspective, a way of looking and type of presentation.
