Allister Hill

PhD Members

Allister Hill is an anthropologist and PhD candidate with Media and Communication and part of RMIT’s Sustainable Urban Precincts Program (SUPP) project: “Work-life ecologies: lifestyle, sustainability, practices”.

Allister’s PhD is an ethnography that examines the relationship between materiality, space and sustainability in what may be considered a ‘smart’ building – RMIT’s ‘Swanson Academic Building’ (the SAB). The ethnography of the SAB aims to explore, via a sociomaterial sensitivity, ways in which the intersection between infrastructure and the built environment might shape everyday organisational practices.

The implications for sustainability will be teased out along the way to consider if attempts at patterning ‘smarter’ ways of working, in the smart built environment, equate to sustainable practices. As well as other ethnographic methods Allister will be asking his informants to use a mobile app to document their experiences while using the SAB.