Rob Nice

Senior Lecturer Architecture and Design

I have been active within design education and the associated disciplines since 1995, working in a variety of positions across many different sectors. For the past sixteen years I have contributed too and now lead the Stage One BA(Hons) Architecture course based in Canterbury.

My pedagogic research expertise includes student transition into Higher Education centered around student experience. In October 2019, my work in this area was acknowledged, as I was awarded a prize for Teaching Excellence (Enhancing the Student/staff Experience). I have also supported a Learning Development Tutor, on an ESRC-funded doctoral study, that responds to research commissioned by RIBA and HEFCE into educational inequalities. I gained professional recognition, becoming a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2013.

My own practice led research stems from an ongoing fascination, with what could be described as the consequence(s) of architecture, the underused and unused spaces to be found in our towns and cities and how these spaces can be appropriated in unorthodox ways, exploring new/alternative forms of occupancy, through even the smallest of gestures. Exploring the interactions between people and their built environment, in particular those who may feel marginalised or even excluded, and how their behaviours are influenced, or alternatively influence, the environment around them.

A key part of these explorations is deploying, curating and/or suggesting, either sanctioned or unsanctioned interventions, which have the potential to manifest themselves as subversive actions, events, constructions and/or publications. As a result, I recently founded the Bureau of Alternative Spatial Occupancy, a semi-fictional, think and sometimes do tank. The aim, to establish alternative ways of thinking critically about our relationship with the built environment.