Respect, Relationships and “Just Spending Time with Them”: Critical Elements for Engaging Aboriginal Students in Primary School Education

While disparities in educational outcomes for Aboriginal children have narrowed in early childhood education and for Year 12 completions, these positive trends are not replicated in the intervening years where attendance, reading, writing, and numeracy targets have been missed. Erratic attendance in the primary years has the greatest impact on achievement; literacy and numeracy scores decline as absences increase. Family functioning and health, caregiver expectations, past encounters with the education system and socio-economic disadvantage are all implicated in poorer rates of attendance. In response to community concerns, an Aboriginal/mainstream partnership was forged in 2011 and began work in 2016 to address patterns of attendance and achievement among Aboriginal primary students in a regional city in Western Australia. This paper describes the innovative, community-led “More Than Talk” program and presents findings from teaching and support staff interviews two years after implementation. Qualitative methods were employed to analyse the data, develop themes, and ensure rigour. Findings highlighted the cascading impact of erratic attendance and the role of strong relationships, respect, and investment of time with children as critical elements in student engagement and wellbeing. Community-led, collaborative educational programs have the potential to positively impact Aboriginal students’ engagement and contribute to culturally responsive environments. If sustained, such efforts can enable learning to flourish.

Scripted tower [Creative coding for responsive environments]

<p>This thesis is based on investigating computational design methodologies for the generation of responsive environments, exploring the opportunities that creative coding and parametric based design approaches can offer architects of the 21st century. It is highly research focused with a test-case design formulated as an outcome of this research. Architecture has always evolved with history to remain a manifestation and reflection of society and the materials/tools available to the architects at the time. Today, technological advancements and computational techniques have redefined the agency of design methodologies and manifested a paradigmatic shift to the context and practice of architecture. Computationally mediated form finding techniques have rapidly evolved over the past twenty years and continue to advance the possibilities to generate new building forms and complex, responsive, and adaptive geometries. It is undeniable that within the last decade, digital technologies have begun to initiate a paramount ensemble of affordance that are reconfiguring design and design thinking. This research invites the possibilities of creative-code-based design systems, as this approach becomes more widely taken up and more confidently embedded into the design process by architects and designers across the globe. Scripting/coding is typically seen primarily as a productivity tool compared to its potential to assist design exploration however, the power of computationally mediated design does not lie in computer aided design (CAD) based work flows, but in the possibility to engage with algorithmic design processes that unite design with the computer; the difference between computerisation (CAD) and computation (scripting). This research investigates the potentials of a computational design methodology that integrates creative coding techniques for early-stage design approach. There are endless ways to utilise code-based processes for design; to begin, this research focuses on exploring a few common techniques, leading into a novel, innovative code that is context specific and locally and globally responsive. The nature of code is inherently open-source with digital files easily transferable and shared online. This poses prevalent current concerns surrounding topics of authorship, and generates speculations of how this may affect/contribute to the wider profession and the future of the architectural profession - another discourse addressed in this research. The outcome of this research process is tested through a system for a responsive tower design. The tower is highly speculative and is primarily concerned/focused on the innovative design process and, accordingly, the potentials for creative-code-based generative design in architecture. The tower is context specific to Wellington, embedding local wind data and immediate environmental conditions into the code, employing an emergent/generative design that could not have been prior conceived-of with the human mind alone. Developing on Carpo’s quote (page 10) further, this thesis builds upon this concept that there is meaning in employing digital design methodologies in such a way that allow for design developments which are unique, original, meaningful, and only possible because of the digital tools currently available to architects of the 21st century.</p>

Scripted tower [Creative coding for responsive environments]

<p>This thesis is based on investigating computational design methodologies for the generation of responsive environments, exploring the opportunities that creative coding and parametric based design approaches can offer architects of the 21st century. It is highly research focused with a test-case design formulated as an outcome of this research. Architecture has always evolved with history to remain a manifestation and reflection of society and the materials/tools available to the architects at the time. Today, technological advancements and computational techniques have redefined the agency of design methodologies and manifested a paradigmatic shift to the context and practice of architecture. Computationally mediated form finding techniques have rapidly evolved over the past twenty years and continue to advance the possibilities to generate new building forms and complex, responsive, and adaptive geometries. It is undeniable that within the last decade, digital technologies have begun to initiate a paramount ensemble of affordance that are reconfiguring design and design thinking. This research invites the possibilities of creative-code-based design systems, as this approach becomes more widely taken up and more confidently embedded into the design process by architects and designers across the globe. Scripting/coding is typically seen primarily as a productivity tool compared to its potential to assist design exploration however, the power of computationally mediated design does not lie in computer aided design (CAD) based work flows, but in the possibility to engage with algorithmic design processes that unite design with the computer; the difference between computerisation (CAD) and computation (scripting). This research investigates the potentials of a computational design methodology that integrates creative coding techniques for early-stage design approach. There are endless ways to utilise code-based processes for design; to begin, this research focuses on exploring a few common techniques, leading into a novel, innovative code that is context specific and locally and globally responsive. The nature of code is inherently open-source with digital files easily transferable and shared online. This poses prevalent current concerns surrounding topics of authorship, and generates speculations of how this may affect/contribute to the wider profession and the future of the architectural profession - another discourse addressed in this research. The outcome of this research process is tested through a system for a responsive tower design. The tower is highly speculative and is primarily concerned/focused on the innovative design process and, accordingly, the potentials for creative-code-based generative design in architecture. The tower is context specific to Wellington, embedding local wind data and immediate environmental conditions into the code, employing an emergent/generative design that could not have been prior conceived-of with the human mind alone. Developing on Carpo’s quote (page 10) further, this thesis builds upon this concept that there is meaning in employing digital design methodologies in such a way that allow for design developments which are unique, original, meaningful, and only possible because of the digital tools currently available to architects of the 21st century.</p>

The Body, the Threshold, and the Cut: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Measuring in Interactive Media Art

New media artists working on interactive installations often rely on different monitoring techniques, such as variable sensors in the design and the production of responsive environments and objects. In this short commentary, I will inquire into my installation Mother, Child (2011/2000) to address a new media art practice as productive alignment of agencies at the interface. The term body-sensor co-performance is used to foreground both the performative nature and the fundamental integrity of the technology and the body in interactive art. I will suggest that the setting of threshold values for different measuring operations can be understood as the boundary-making process, through which the installation feeds off the embodied liveliness of its audiences for its responsive actions. Drawing on Karen Barad’s work, these thresholds can be thematized as agential cuts. A number of specific examples in using sensors for interactivity are then addressed in order to inquire into the ways in which the questions of ethics and aesthetics entangle in creative and collaborative labors for Mother, Child.

What Urban Cameras Reveal About the City: The Work of the Senseable City Lab

Cameras are part of the urban landscape and a testimony to our social interactions with city. Deployed on buildings and street lights as surveillance tools, carried by billions of people daily, or as an assistive technology in vehicles, we rely on this abundance of images to interact with the city. Making sense of such large visual datasets is the key to understanding and managing contemporary cities. In this chapter, we focus on techniques such as computer vision and machine learning to understand different aspects of the city. Here, we discuss how these visual data can help us to measure legibility of space, quantify different aspects of urban life, and design responsive environments. The chapter is based on the work of the Senseable City Lab, including the use of Google Street View images to measure green canopy in urban areas, the use of thermal images to actively measure heat leaks in buildings, and the use of computer vision and machine learning techniques to analyze urban imagery in order to understand how people move in and use public spaces.