Last year I was lucky to sign up for DS6 - in its inaugural year. Back when I was a second year in 2010 I tackled a parametric technology based studio and it did not end 0. I failed the year and vowed to avoid a technology based studio ever again . . . When DS6 was pitched the integration of technology to design intrigued me and I was really interested in pushing myself into something that could well end in disaster. The first ever studio meeting is always exciting. We were each asked to talk about ourselves [0], an easy task for the over talkative person like me. Following this we were given a single task to develop a piece of wearable technology that took in data about its surroundings whi

Interdisciplinary practice is being embraced by the architecturalcommunity, but how far can collaboration go? In a recentinterdisciplinary project in Söderhamn, Sweden, members of the group Gang of Six (formed in the melting pot of the Oxford Brookes first yearstudio) participated in a collaboration with two musicians, JohanJutterstrom and Linda Olah, two dancers, Toby Kassel and IngeborgZackariassen and visual artist, Andreas Larsson. The central idea of the project was to produce a piece of hands-on public art in which each artistic discipline participated in the work through a full collaboration with the others. The project lasted for a week, and took place in a public park in the centre

Your reading of the title says more about you than it does me. I spent a few minutes going through my fetishes – as anyone might when confronted by this theme. I realised that a [hu]man can turn almost anything into a fetish; any action, any piece of clothing, any smell, any material. I guess this is in line with the postmodern condition as discussed by Jean-François Lyotard – we are able to enjoy a profusion of small narratives and this leads to a plural of fetishes. Or maybe we just have too much time and media on our hands? I found myself YouTubing “Jean-François Lyotard” and started to watch him discuss La postmodernité with Luc Ferry in 1989 (in French, a language I only partially under

Although it is mostly associated with the world of sex, sexual activities and kink, we are all victims of this feeling on a day to day basis. I say victims because it is something that comes in a subconscious way, it attacks our ideas and the way we go about our life. As individuals we are attracted to things, objects, concepts, which to anyone else could seem trivial, but for us they have a strong psychological effect. Evidently I am talking about our deepest, dirtiest and most twisted fetishes. As students of architecture and architects we might confuse those feelings with passion or we might even call it our style. How many times have you got into bed … this is getting interesting right?

It was the late American architect, Louis Kahn who said, “A good question is always greater than the most brilliant answer.” Within our research enquiry however, we felt that a good question should not only consider what to ask but also who to ask. Subsequently, if our aim is to imagine what a civically-informed curricula for Higher Education might look like, then we need to involve more than academics and students in the process of establishing a meaningful definition. Taking a playfully engaging, human-inhabited, neon-painted Civic Pedagogy TV (CPTV) camera onto the streets adjacent to University campuses in New York, London and Oxford, we filmed members of the public responding to questio