Charles Rice

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, staff, distinguished guests, graduates, families and friends: I’m delighted to have been asked to give the occasional address today, and I’d like to begin by offering my personal congratulations to graduates for all you have achieved with the award of your degrees. And I’d especially like to congratulate you for turning out in such amazing shoes!

We tend to think of an event such as a graduation as being bound to tradition, unchanging in its protocols, the academic robes defining all participants according rank and a hierarchy of distinction. But in your choice of footwear – from flats, wedges and stilettos, to boots and brogues – each of you designed your walk across the podium today. Whether consciously or not, you understood what you wanted to communicate about yourself in the midst of how the ceremony defined the way you became a graduate.

This is one way to characterise the transformative power of design: the adaption and recreation of given circumstances in new and dynamic ways, in ways that tell us about who we are and who we want to become.

And it is no different for physical structures. Take the magnificent hall we are in today. It doesn’t regale you with the university’s past. Rather, it attempts to set the stage for its future, as befits Australia’s premier young university. This new interior design has transformed what was a rather drab space of bare concrete and tired drapes. Now, I happen to be a fan of bare concrete, and the UTS Tower is a particularly good example of what has come to be known as brutalist architecture. Part of what is great about the Tower is that its podium provides the context within which new spatial designs can be realised. Yet, design’s transformative power is not about replacing one thing with another, as if its remit is simply to keep things up to date. Rather, this design, and in particular how it was actually made and installed in the space, tells an interesting story about innovation.

The design is by the architects John de Manincor and Adam Russell, both of whom have taught at UTS. But they couldn’t have made it without the help of UTS alumnus Robert Beson.

What Robert did was to take a highly idiosyncratic design, which could have been very costly to manufacture and difficult to install, and turn it into something like a kit of parts. Using various computer software, he refined the design so that it could be easily manufactured and installed. Part of this involved modelling the exact position of each element in three-dimensional space. This helped the builders to see in advance how the panels would be joined together, allowing them to be installed exactly to the millimetre, and in a short amount of time. This is no small feat considering the number of angles involved – certainly a spirit level was of no help on this building site. The digital model enabled problems normally encountered in construction to be identified and solved even before any of the panels were manufactured.

Just six years from graduating in architecture here at UTS, Robert has developed a highly successful business, called AR-MA, which translates often difficult and highly idiosyncratic designs into production, saving more than a few architects’ bacon in the process.

The innovation on display here is not in what the space looks like or even in how it functions, though of course, these things are of signal importance for any design. Rather, the innovation is in developing a way of working, and a business model, that enables complex design aspirations to be more easily translated into reality. In this way the envelope of design itself can be pushed further.

This kind of innovation is key to design education. Each of you graduating today were educated in a context which didn’t simply provide you with known solutions or established ways of working. This would have been frustrating at times, when you simply wanted to learn what the best or right solution should be. It probably seemed like you were being forced to reinvent the wheel with every single studio task you undertook. But in this way, your education was more about a way of thinking about design, and in embodying a designerly attitude toward life. These are the skills which enable innovation in design.

So I trust you will go forth and walk the walk of a designer, knowing that that means more than just giving us the most up-to-date spaces and things. Walking that walk as a graduate means that you have an important role in helping us shape our lives, whether in special ceremonies such as today’s, or in the more mundane rituals of our domestic or workaday lives. Because design stages who we are, and, crucially, who we aspire to be.

Chancellor, that concludes my address.