Conference theme: Material World
Date & Time: Friday 22nd August, 9.30am – 6.00pm+
Location: HDR Sydney, Level 24/25 Martin Pl, Sydney NSW 2000
The CoDe Conference 2025 presents and celebrates Graduation Research Projects by the final-year UNSW Bachelor of Design in Computational Design students, who continue to lead innovation in design technology for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.
The 2025 graduation research projects address a diverse and advanced range of topics including generative AI workflows for architectural design, procedural modelling for urban environments, kinetic façade systems for environmental responsiveness, computational optimisation for fabrication, immersive technologies for design evaluation, data-driven socio-spatial analysis, and advanced robotic manufacturing techniques.
UNSW CoDe extends its sincere thanks to the 2025 industry collaborators — Aurecon, Arch Manu, Arup, Bates Smart, BVN, HDR, Mott MacDonald, Systems Reef, Tilt, UNSW DFL, UNSW Estate Management — for their expert contributions and engagement this year.
Industry collaboration remains central to developing our students’ ability to address real-world challenges and opportunities, while accelerating design technology research and innovation to deliver meaningful impact in practice and society.
Keynote Speaker
Mehrnoush Latifi Khorasgan
Mehrnoush is a Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the Bachelor of Design (Architecture) at Swinburne University of Technology, with over 15 years of global experience in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector. Her research, teaching, and practice span BIM, computational design, digital fabrication, microclimate and thermal comfort, all underpinned by a distinctive vision to develop a multiscalar performance-based design approach.
She frames microclimate design in architecture as part of a larger network of interrelated elements, addressing its complexity through systemic thinking rather than oversimplifying it to a single variable, measurement, or isolated scale. This multiscalar workflow connects performance-based analysis across different levels of a project, showing how decisions made at one scale influence, and are influenced by, those at other scales, from the macro-scale of urban fabric and landscape, to meso-scale building form, to the micro-scale of building units and components, and down to material innovation, and spatial qualities experienced and perceived through the human body and mind as a micro-system of cross-sensory perception. She has introduced and applied this methodology in both her professional practice and studio teaching. Drawing on technologies and techniques from other disciplines, particularly neuroscience, Mehrnoush employs virtual and augmented reality, EEG, and biosensors to simulate and visualise the complex microclimatic impacts on people’s perception to provide deeper insight into the influence of cross-sensory perception.
Her research methodology has been published in journals and book chapters, and her creative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Embracing Innovation at CRAFT ACT (2015 and 2016, Canberra), Make the Invisible Visible in the Dynamics of Air exhibition at RMIT Gallery (2018, Melbourne), Fireless Skin: Mycelium Biocomposites in Life and Death for Melbourne Design Week (2020), TIME SPACE EXISTENCE at the Venice Biennale (2021), and MycoClad in IM-PERMANENT for Melbourne Design Week 2023
Schedule
| Conference Room 1 (Teams Link) | Conference Room 2 (Teams Link) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Student | Title | Industry Partner | Student | Title | Industry Partner |
| 09:30 | Arrival & Registration | |||||
| 10:00 | Welcome — Nicole Gardner (UNSW), Cristina Ramos Jaime (UNSW), Leo Meng (HDR) | |||||
| 10:20 | Daniella Cotterell | The office reimagined: Optimising Office Space Utilisation Through Data-Driven Socio-Spatial Insights | BVN | Daniel Cao | Procedural Urbanism: Typologically-Informed Procedural Building Generation Workflow for Urban Design | HDR |
| 10:40 | Emily Tan | Mind the Gap: A Computational Design Tool for Automating Floor-Plan Analysis for Comfort | MottMacDonald | Hoi Hung Zhong | A Computational Design Workflow for a Solar Responsive Dynamic Façade System | — |
| 11:00 | Julian Kasch | Sliced for Solid Ground: Computationally Layered PLA Formworks for Freeform Rammed Earth | — | Jhazmin Verbo | Follow The User: Computationally Designing a Human-Centred Adaptable Kinetic Facade | BatesSmart |
| 11:20 | Nicolas Pan | Validating Space Syntax: A Web-based Visualisation of DepthmapX Spatial Analysis of an Australian University Campus | UNSW Estate Management | Louis Sabri | Designing for Demoulding: Parametric Moulds that Know When to Let Go | Arup / UNSW DFL |
| 11:40 | Sidney Mendez | A Computational Design Workflow for Optimising E-Commerce Multi Product Packaging to Reduce Material Waste and Environmental Impact | — | Shaojie (Davy) Dai | Optimising Building Facades: A Computational Design Workflow for a Climate-Responsive Dynamic Façade System | — |
| 12:00 | — | — | — | Soo Ha Shin | Weather Where it Matters: Machine Learning for Site-Specific Urban Microclimate Analysis in the AEC Industry | Arup |
| 12:20 | Lunch | |||||
| 13:30 | Changshuo Li | Fabrication-aware Design: Developing a Computational Design Workflow for Nodal Structure Topology Optimisation for Lightweight Architectural Systems | Arch Manu | Mingyue (Angel) Wang | Feedback in Motion: Integrating Strand7 API with Grasshopper for Real-Time Structural Design Feedback | Aurecon |
| 13:50 | Qian-Ye (Sally) Leung | User-Controlled Modular Kinetic Façade for Soalar Adatption Using Parametric Simulation Tools | — | Weijia Li | Interactive Mapping of Rental Priorities: A People-Centred Web Tool for Informed Housing Decisions | — |
| 14:10 | Jayden Tran | STRAYING FROM THE PATH: Non continuous paths for multipart simultaneous 3D printing | Systems Reef / UNSW DFL | Stephanie Duong | Emission Impossible: A Geospatial Routing Tool for Low-Carbon Material Specification in Early-Stage Design | MottMacDonald |
| 14:30 | Tristan Luong | Computational (Grasshopper) workflow: exploring the feasibility and performance of motorised kinetic facades for enhancing environmental responsiveness within urban contexts, compared to traditional static facade systems | — | William Boge | Optimising the Urban Visualisation Pipeline: Integrating Late-Stage Diffusion Models for Rapid Fidelity-Preserving Renders | BVN |
| 14:50 | William Li | Im/possible Printing: A Design-to-Fabrication Workflow to Democratise Access to Non-Planar 3D Slicing and Printing | — | Zahraa Tanana | Materials Matter: A Computational Design Workflow to Integrate Recycled Plastic in a Kinetic Façade System | — |
| 15:20 | Afternoon Tea & Coffee | |||||
| 15:45 | Presentation: Prof. Matthias Haeusler UNSW Arch_Manu Next-Gen Architecture Manufacturing | |||||
| 16:45 | Break | |||||
| 17:00 | Keynote: Dr. Mehrnoush Latifi Khorasgani (Swinburne University / Arch Manu CI) | |||||