Melbourne Design Week

Created for Melbourne Design Week at Hayball’s Flinders Lane studio, the installation serves as both a critique of prevailing Australian building practice and a proof of concept for a new contact-based technology designed to collects behavioural data and identifies early indicators of falls, age-related decline or dementia.

The architecture is conceived around modularity, disassembly and circular material use, challenging conventional procurement and planning models that favour fixed, linear construction. Rather than functioning as a representational object, the prototype becomes an experimental platform for testing material, spatial and sensory performance.

Within a darkened interior, reduced visual stimuli and calibrated acoustic feedback are used to study movement, perception and orientation. Sound intensifies with proximity and recedes with distance, creating a responsive relationship between the body and space. An original soundscape, developed with a New Zealand university, further shapes this immersive environment.

The project positions architecture as applied research, testing new relationships between technology, construction, care and human behaviour.