Systems Upgrade: (Re)fabricating Tectonic Prototypes

The book submits that a deep study of legacy material artifacts, through the lens of contemporary digital design can constitute a valuable bridge between design history and contemporary creative practice.

Systems Upgrade focuses on an investigation into the ways that we may re-describe and upgrade these design legacies for extension in future practice. The book explicates this through a deep dive into the re-description and re-design of the works of Austrian American sculptor and designer: Erwin Hauer. Systems Upgrade offers a design research approach that leverages the embodied knowledge latent within the material legacies of design history for direct applicability in creative practice. 

This long-spanning research into the construction of links between the deep study of precedent and future practice has been advanced through a simultaneous engagement with digital archeology and the new tools of creative practice. Invested in the belief of a need to open design and its material legacies to a multiverse, this research has yielded a collection of methods, techniques and novel outcomes grounded in history yet openly speculative in outlook. Systems Upgrade extensively illustrates an engagement with some of the most notable works of the Austrian American sculptor and designer Erwin Hauer. This book highlights several important phases of this specific design research project to provide a detailed view of how a series of bridges between analysis to creative practice may be achieved.

Leire Asensio Villoria is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne's School of Design and is a co-director of the MSD’s ADD+F (Advanced Digital Design and Fabrication) Research Hub. She has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture and at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Leire is an author of Architecture of Waste: A (Re)Planned Obsolescence (Actar) and Lifestyled: Health and Places (Jovis).

David S.C. Mah is a senior lecturer in urban design and architecture at the University of Melbourne’s school of design. David has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Cornell University’s department of architecture at the graduate design school of the Architectural Association in London. David is an author of the book: Lifestyled Health and Places (Jovis). Together with Leire, his creative works have been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week amongst others.