Smarter Hobart Challenge
The Smarter Hobart Challenge – Bus Shelter and Integrated Digital Interface Design Competition – was a creative challenge for the community to bring forward their most innovative and exciting ideas to help transform Hobart's public transport services, and help make waiting for the bus reliable, safe, accessible and socially connective.
The competition began in 2020, with the winner, Supermanoeuvre, announced in July 2021.
Winner - 2022 Planning Institute of Australia National Award for Technology & Digital Innovation
The Smarter Hobart Challenge and partner Supermanoeuvre have taken out the Tasmania State Award and prestigious National Award for Technology and Innovation.
The community co-design competition captured the imagination of creatives around the world, with over 120 design and technology teams stepping up to the challenge from far and wide. New York, India, South America, Russia, Ukraine, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, France as well as local and national innovators all contributed to the extraordinary pool of collective ideas and proposals.
The quality and thoughtfulness of the submissions highlighted the timeliness and relevance of this project in finding practical, technology-based solutions to address climate imperatives and keep our community safe, empowered, connected and informed.
The City of Hobart is embarking on the first digital, modular, low-cost and nationally compliant digital bus shelter in Hobart in the coming months.
The City hopes that these shelters will become an integral part of the City's future-ready smart city ecosystem.
Supermanoeuvre
Supermanoeuvre is an award-winning architectural and innovation practice operating out of Sydney and Zurich, which has exhibited internationally and represented Australia at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The winning entry from the shortlisted group was a modular design that will service future community need and technological change. Rather than developing a single bus shelter design, Supermanoeuvre developed an end-to-end, computational design and fabrication process (parametric design and manufacture), which is highly innovative and enables shelters to be easily configured to each site and locally manufactured.
An augmented-reality process allows a shelter to be viewed and configured on-site (through VR goggles) before being approved for manufacture.
The shelters are planned to be built using local timber supporting local production and construction industries, with job creation and skills development in new manufacturing techniques.
Un-thinned and renewable plantation hardwood is planned as the main construction material for the shelters, utilising a timber product from a Tasmanian start-up company that has developed a cross-laminating timber process to value-add to timber that would otherwise go to pulp.
The large close-fitting "dovetail" joints and exposed timber speaks of the Tasmanian story – pride in craftsmanship, local materials, and traditional building techniques.
The digital bus shelter will offer a low-cost, community-inclusive, nationally compliant, sustainable piece of iconic social infrastructure in Hobart.
Shortlisted finalists
The winner was selected from shortlisted finalists who presented their design concepts to representatives from Metro Tasmania, the local design community and architects, engineers and officers from the City of Hobart. The other four finalists were:
Urban Lab (Tasmania)
URBAN LAB - Concept Presentation(PDF, 13MB)
WOW and Core Collective Architects – Runner-Up (Tasmania)
WOW and Core Collective Architects - Concept Presentation(PDF, 34MB)
Monash University Mobility Design Lab (Melbourne)
Monash University Mobility Design Lab - Concept Presentation(PDF, 9MB)
The Collective & Metrospec (Melbourne)
The Collective and Metrospec - Concept Presentation(PDF, 27MB)
People's Choice Award
The City of Hobart would also like to congratulate MAC Studio (Launceston/Melbourne) for winning the People's Choice Award.
People's Choice Winner - MAC Studio(PDF, 3MB)
All entries
Images of the majority of the 120 entries are available for viewing below.
Lets reimagine public transport travel as a playful, connective informative and an immersive personalised experience!
Queries can be directed to ConnectedHobart@hobartcity.com.au