You are kindly invited to a seminar organized by the Department of Interior Architecture and Environmental Design.
Speaker: Sevgim Pekdemir
Title: “From Interior Space to Urban Form: Researching Circular Design Across Scales”
Date: June 09, 2026, Tuesday
Time: 13.30-14.30
Place: FF Building, FB22
Abstract
Design disciplines increasingly face the challenge of responding to climate pressures, resource constraints, and evolving housing needs across multiple scales. This seminar presents my research journey from architecture and sustainability to circular urban design, exploring how circular design thinking can inform spatial strategies across different scales and disciplines, such as interiors, buildings and mid-rise urban precincts. Drawing on design-led research, urban morphology, systematic review, and participatory design methods, my work investigates how circularity can move beyond conceptual sustainability discourse into actionable spatial design processes. The seminar will present key research contributions, including the development of circular urban design frameworks, design translation methods, and applications in adaptive housing and precinct-scale urban transformation. Through selected publications and research projects, the presentation reflects on how architecture, interior architecture, and urban design can be connected through multi-scalar design thinking to achieve circularity and support more adaptive, regenerative, and resilient built environments.
Short Bio
Sevgim Pekdemir is a sessional academic in Urban Design at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, and a visiting researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. She is a a PhD Candidate with a background in architecture and sustainability across Türkiye, Italy, and Australia, her research focuses on circular urban design, adaptive housing, and design strategies and processes for sustainable transformation. Her work explores how circular design thinking can be translated across scales, from buildings and interiors to midrise urban precincts, through design-led and participatory approaches. She has published in journals including Cities and the Journal of Urban Design, while also teaching architecture and interior architecture studios at QUT and UNSW, and projects supervising undergraduate honours research.