Western Sydney University - Fabrication + Installing for the Future
How do you install a 8.6m ceiling robot into a concrete roof? Lift in segments.
After years of meetings, sketches, prototypes, and a few design headaches, we finally arrived at the most exciting—and nerve-racking—stage of our biggest project to date: fabrication and install. This was the moment where every detail, down to the millimetre, mattered. Every component we had imagined, engineered, and refined had to come together seamlessly. No more theory. No more “what if.” Now it had to work.
Diehard designers… read on
The Steel Frame
Fabrication kicked off with the heart of the project: suspending an 8-metre circular steel frame from a concrete slab, 4.6 metres above the floor. Easy to say, not so easy to do. Ogis Engineering fabricated the frame, and our team—Anton, Selina and Simon, joined by our engineer Soda from TTW and the Built crew—checked every last detail before it was shipped to site. Reviewing everything laid out on the ground uncovered a few adjustments, saving us headaches down the line, and ensured the frame fit seamlessly into the ceiling. Simon and Drew coordinated the installation of the steel frame with the Ogis team, and within a week, the base for our installation was secured to the roof.
One centre, once critical edge
One of the key design challenges in designing and installing the frame was working around a bulkhead in the space. This meant a great number of the services we needed to access were compressed through the installation, posing particular challenges when working with the fire safety engineer (thank you Introba). It required a custom adjustment to the steel work as the frame’s layout had to account for this bulkhead. The amazing work of Ogis engineering came into sharp relief as we had to align the bulkhead edge with the centre of the room. We had to make two custom droppers which determined the layout of the chassis. The steel was meticulously laid out to then laser transcribed to the soffit before lifting began.
The Breakdown
To simplify what was a wildly complex build, we broke the installation into 12 “wedges.” Each wedge consisted of an inner tray, an outer tray, two motor boxes, two cowling pieces, and one large blade. Add it all together and you get:
2.3 tonne steel frame
12 large outer trays
12 small inner trays
24 motorised boxes
24 cowling pieces
12 large blades
1 robotic centre cone
Each part of the wedge was a complex sub-assembly, including blends of sheet metal, electronics, lights, speakers, fans, actuators, 3D prints, vacuum forms and fasteners. Before everything could be installed onsite, the team had to put together all of the sub-assemblies offsite and then deliver them to a holding space ready for installation.
Assembly
As part of this offsite assembly process, our team worked between two spaces: our workshop in North Sydney and Artarmon. By November, with the summer heat setting in, it was all hands on deck. Meanwhile, team member Kaan was working in his own dark space, programming all of our lighting controls and sequences.
Our assembly work began with 24 newly arrived trays, freshly powder-coated in Black Charisma Ace. Assembly of all the trays took around two weeks with four designers, and was shortly followed by the rather complex assembly of 24 cowling pieces. Assembling something is the best way to learn what does and doesn’t work. adjustments were made and lessons were learned. It was around this point in the project when Anton realised he may have purchased all the 13mm ring spanners in NSW, with our total count coming to 20, which mysteriously dwindled down to six, at the close of the project (contact Anton if you need to loosen up and M8 bolt).
After many hot weeks and long days, we had assembled all the trays and cowling pieces, and delivered them to site in our trusty accomplice, Terry the Van. Here they awaited installation on the 11th floor of the brand new Bankstown Campus while our assembly work continued in the workshop.
With the trays laid out, networking began in earnest to map all of the LED arrays. We moved production of the large blades into the workshop. Some days were spent troubleshooting wiring for the 24 fitted light bars; others were about shuffling 2.4-metre blades around tight corners.
In early December, we received the first of six 3D printed nose cone blades. In an ideal scenario, we would have printed each blade cover in one piece, but warping at this scale forced us to divide it into smaller sections. This meant Simon spent a week mounting the smaller prints to the steel frame, followed by scrupulously filling and sanding to make the individual prints appear as one. At the same time, Selina, Anton and Amber assembled the nose cone frame before sending them to site.
Before wrapping up for the Christmas break, we had one more crucial task to complete: White Card Training. On a beautiful summer Saturday, Anton sent the team to the depths of Haymarket to learn about the health and safety protocols of the construction industry. By the end of the day, we were all equipped with our shiny white cards and were ready to face the construction site in the New Year.
Following the end-of-year break, our team got stuck back into assembly work. With our install deadline approaching at the end of the month, we were under pressure to finish our final offsite assemblies and get onsite as soon as possible. We spent the first working week of the year wiring up twelve control drivers. This is an understated way of describing a week’s worth of following wiring diagrams, cutting and prepping cables, soldering and organising cables onto small, tightly-packed trays. Once everything was wired, Kaan began networking motorised systems that would eventually animate the installation.
The Install Begins
At the same time, having just obtained shiny new scissor lift licences, Drew and Selina began working onsite. The install began with fastening the stage truss and saddles to the steel base frame. The truss runs directly through the centre of the frame (the nose cone will later be fastened to this) and the saddles divide the structure into the twelve wedges. These are what the trays rest on.
With the saddles in, the team continued the install with the large and small trays, first installing the ones located around fire services and then the remaining spaces. Andrew from Concept Electrical was a big help onsite. Alongside Drew, he helped us install the 24 control boxes above the larger trays. The trays had been fastened to the frame, but were left loose to allow the screen company, Octopus LEDs, to shimmy them accordingly as they installed the screen segments.
While screens were going up, we switched focus back to the workshop, assembling 24 motor boxes, each fitted with a linear actuator, over two long days. As soon as they were done, they were shipped to site. The newly assembled motor boxes were installed over the next few days, with one cowling piece put up to run a collision test with a nearby air duct. Figuring out how to install the cowling pieces was the most difficult part of the installation process, and we had 23 of them left. We realised at this moment that we had a very tough week ahead of us.
Keen to end the day on a high, we took this time to install the cone framework, borrowing some height and muscle from the workers onsite to load the frame. In a move akin to docking a space shuttle, we carefully parked and raised the lift until our cone frame was centred and secured on the truss.
The process of installing the cowling required two people in a scissor lift. Positioning the scissor lift was half the difficulty, as the lift railing could collide with the previously installed cowlings, so great care had to be taken. Once aligned under the corresponding motor box, it was then raised three metres to access the axles on the motor box. The cowling pieces were then lifted by two people and held while M8 bolts were fastened on either side. Aligning the cowling to the motor box was not as easy as it sounds. Nevertheless, after a few days, Selina, Amber and Naomi had 19 cowling pieces installed. The installation of the final cowling pieces was put on hold, pending the university’s installation of a multi-axis robotic arm into the corner of the space.
In the meantime, Naomi, Selina and Drew put up the 12 large blades spanning the steel rings; Anton was on site to test that all 12 fans and 139 LED segments in the ceiling were networking properly with Kaan’s software.
Anton and Selina also spent an afternoon installing the six cone segments to round out the robotic centrepiece.
The final push
Once the robotic arm was in, we installed the final cowling pieces and ran tests to make sure everything worked. Of course, there were hiccups. Troubleshooting was systematic; power, then hardware, then software, always in that order. With the majority of issues being created by contact points in Anderson connectors, many were swapped out for more stabled terminal connectors. With all 24 cowling pieces installed, we were in the final push of our installation. Amber and Selina spent a day levelling the cowling pieces and removing the protective foam used during transit. By this point, countless trips up and down in the scissor lift had become second nature.
With everything installed, we ran over media content with the team Amazing team at Film Time, who had been commissioned to create the projected narrative ‘Story 01’'. We had designed the Innovation Engine to feature five modes titled Wormhole, Drift, Rhythm, Nature and Rev Up. Amber’s media content and Kaan’s networking brought the LED screen and engine to life.
Finally, after months of sweat, snacks, and some very late nights, the Innovation Engine was finished: an immersive design installation that earned its first review not from an academic or designer, but from a small child wandering past the open door. Their response? A simple, awe-struck:
“Wowww.”
Update: We’re proud to announce that Stakk Studio has received an Australian Good Design award for our project, our next article can be found here.