Polytactics in Make Change: Design Thinking in Action

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND
Resilience is "the capacity of a system to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient system can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future". Our project explores concepts of resilience and adaptation in bushfire prone communities. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities which continually adapt through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced to achieve more sustainable environments.

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION
The project is concerned with how we as a society might live with fire and fire-based ecologies. It offers an integrative, resilient approach to living within fire prone environments and adapting existing measures which recognise that bushfire management is a dynamic and complex activity. The project re-purposes and reconsiders existing lightweight polymer materials that are activated by fires. The polymers are cast into lightweight shields - pergola screens at the domestic scale and barricades at the civic scale. When theses shields are heated during a fire, they will transform into a protective ceramic layer. Researchers proposed tacking into existing fire preparation regimes at both the civic and domestic scale. The proposal embraces multiple conditions over time; it seeks to be a useful entity before, during and after fires.

RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE
Polytactics won the inaugural RMIT Design Research Institute Design Challenge (2009), was exhibited at the Melbourne Museum (2009), was one of three Australian works exhibited at the Asia Pacific Design Triennial in Brisbane (2010).