Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL)
Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory website
The Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) is a facility for innovation in transdisciplinary design research and education. It embraces a broad range of investigative modes, involving both highly speculative and industry linked projects. SIAL is concerned with the integration of technical, theoretical and social concerns as part of its innovation agenda. High-end computing, modelling and communication tools associated with disparate disciplines are combined with traditional production techniques. Researchers are engaged in a wide variety of projects that collaboratively disturb artificial distinctions between the physical and virtual, digital and analogue, scientific and artistic, instrumental and philosophical.
SIAL provides the opportunity to research new strategies for viewing and managing information in a spatial perspective. Instead of information technology constraining design decisions to two-dimensional abstractions, representations and models, the whole process will be conducted from concept to realization 'in space' (the 'space' maybe 'physical' for engineering and architectural applications, electronic for collaboration at a distance, but equally 'organisational' in creating new business structures).
Five main points characterise the unique features of SIAL:
- International expertise in Parametric Design
- Programming as a core aspect of design teaching
- Unique experience in pure and applied research
- Unparalleled abilities in the representation of information and ideas.
- A suite of electro acoustic studios
Professor Mark Burry
RMIT Innovation Professor of Spatial Information Architecture
Director – SIAL
Director - RMIT Design Research Institute
ARC Fellow