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Experimental Pressure-Forming: Adding Value through Tooling Improvement, and a Hypothesis for Tooling Provision in Autonomous Development Environments
Get PDFThis paper describes improved pressure forming techniques, metal-forming methods related to industrial processes, but suited to lower capitalisation contracting or do-it-yourself (DIY) fabrication settings. Working from literature and previous research, the author describes advancements to the tooling’s capabilities, compared to other research vectors for double-axis curvature metal forming. These works connect fabricators’ situational constraints to value constructs that surround making’s particularity as research, and to values driving autonomous development construction networks. This paper asks: what values drive, and what value is added by, improving such sub-optimal fabrication processes? Given industrial and digital processes’ extensive capabilities, are there contexts where intermediate technologies are particularly suited? How do those contexts constrain technical researchers’ ability to add value through tooling improvement? This paper presents recent technical research, and projects a method to integrate that research into autonomous development fabrication contexts within the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and China’s Great Bay Region
The Last Ten Years of Traditional Craftsmanship in Miaoxia Village
Get PDFThis article reflects on the disappearing carpentry tradition in a rural village called Miaoxia in Sichuan Province China. Since 2015, villagers, social workers, architects, and university scholars have been collaborating to look for alternative development possibilities in Miaoxia Village. The idea of using the local carpentry tradition has been one of the key focusses in the process. Since the Chinese Economic Reform in 1978, the influence of urbanisation and market economy in China has led the Chinese government to rethink the value of rural customs and traditions. While the country has been encouraging progressive economic development, local making culture and development have subsequently been under threat. The collaborations between social workers and design professions in Miaoxia tested small-scale architecture interventions and educational workshops. These experiments have started to record and test out different ways to save carpentry traditions from extinction. This article outlines this process in Miaoxia and asks for new ideas to re-utilise this traditional making
Sincerely Yours: Orchestrating Tangible Interactive Narrative Experiences
Get PDFThis paper briefly reflects on two aspects of narrative: the use of multimodal analysis to understand the relationships between the senses and the narrative, as well as digital and physical content, and the implications brought from this analytical perspective on the design of interactive narratives. The latter, in particular, concerns narratives that involve tangible interaction and physical manipulation of objects. The creative process of Letters to José, a physical-digital hybrid nonfiction narrative, exemplifies this reflection. In this narrative, the person interacting with the story takes upon multiple roles, among them performatively enacting the story and unfolding the narrative through different mechanics of play
Making a Case for Modularity
Get PDFWhat we design and how it is made are intimately connected. The need to make modular components is a consequence of construction methodology and disposition in production and manufacturing. With the prevalence of digital modelling, designers and architects use modularity not only as design strategy but also to explore new aesthetics. This article examines design and architectural projects that prioritise geometrical and dimensional constraints at different scales, to highlight modular systems as essential areas of research. Here, Material Architecture Lab put together a series of speculative designs that investigate modular components and spatial configurations to accompany the written component. This article scans through a selection of discourses around modularity in architecture to contextualise, question and challenge the innovative potential of modular systems. By engaging with modular design of various types and materials, our aim is to articulate the value attached to a bottom-up design research, from digital modelling to fabrication processes
Arch 002
Get PDFArch 002 describes a design research investigation using off-the-shelf high-density polyethylene drainage pipe as a flexible concrete casting formwork through a process oscillating between digital design, physical fabrication, and digital fabrication methodologies. Through this process, the project team generated hypothetical architectures that serve to further develop their material counterparts. Drawing on contemporary casting technologies and historical structural modelling techniques, the experiments suggest a system for the encoding mass and force into three-dimensional forms, creating structures that serve as drawings of their creation process. Exploring notions of the readymade and postprocessing, the research explores iterative processes of making to transform normative construction components into transcendent material experiences
Post Human Craft: A Humble Attempt to Reorient Makers to the Inevitable
Get PDFNearing the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century many craftspeople and makers are waking up to the inevitable reality that our next human evolution may not be the same, that this time it could be different. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum refers to what we are beginning to experience as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab 2017, 01). Schwab and his colleagues believe that this revolution could be much more powerful and will occur in a shorter period than the preceding industrial and digital revolutions. This revolution will cause a profound change in how we practice, labour and orient ourselves in the world. Rapidly evolving technologies will proliferate the use of robotics and personalised robots (co-bots) that can sense our presence and safely work alongside us. Digital algorithms are already becoming more reliable predictors of complex questions in medicine and economics than their human counterparts. Therefore, the gap between what a computer can learn and solve and what a robot can do will quickly close in the craft traditions. This article will engage in the discourse of posthumanism and cybernetics and how these debates relate to craft and making. Intentionally this work is not a proud manifesto of positions, strategies, and guidelines required for greatness. Alternatively, it is a humble attempt to reorient makers to the necessary discourse required to navigate the inevitable changes they will face in their disciplines. Thus, the article seeks to transfer posthumanist literary understanding to intellectually position craft in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
An Education of Intuition and Process: Learning Architectural Design at Hong Kong Design Institute
Get PDFThis paper is a positioning statement and expository article describing design and fabrication projects built by students and faculty of the Hong Kong Design Institute’s (HKDI’s) Architecture programme. Through a series of experimental design-build projects, HKDI faculty teaches students the knowledge and experience to be gained through personal fabrication work, whether wholly manual or digitally assisted. The author stages the work against a series of excerpts from notable architects’ writings, describing a field of study relating tacit knowledge, architectural education, and fabrication specifics students explore through projects in Hong Kong and South China. Lessons and summary bodies of knowledge drawn from these preliminary projects define the path forward for HKDI’s spatial design pedagogy and research
Seizing the Real: From Global Tools to Design 3.0
Get PDFThis article reflects the design community’s interest in Global Tools, a 1970’s radical movement in architecture and design, born in Italy and corresponding to a shift from design considered as a practice to a cultural movement that is able to propose new paradigms. Activists involved in making, such as Victor Papanek (1973), in a post-nuclear culture in The Whole Earth Catalog (1971), and by several actors in Aspen, Colorado in 1971, precipitated this movement to the design community. The movement questions the impact of a mass production and consumption model generating an economic, social, and environmental crisis. Global Tools initiated as a school by Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Branzi, questioning the role of the industry as part of a paradigm in which the issue was not how designers could contribute to industry, but how industry could contribute to society. In this article conceived as an interview, the research activity of institut supérieur des arts de Toulouse (isdaT) reveals a manifesto towards making in a social economic and milieutechnology new paradigm, with polemic and conceptual relationships to both Global Tools and Design 3.0
The Social Significance of Gender Codes in Current Web Design
Get PDFThe article highlights gender codes in design, particularly in web design, by means of current examples. Different aspects of gender-specific design are looked at in detail and their inherent problems discussed: on the one hand the development of a special solution (gender-specific for women), on the other hand, web design with reduced functionality and simplification of information (i.e. image representation) which sometimes even leads to a negation of technology. The article illustrates that gender codes and stereotypical role models can be embodied on different design levels of web design (use and artefact): in structure/navigation, in creative elements by the use of shape, colour and imagery and on a textual level. These design decisions have an impact on the power of users to act, their individual gender identity and the structural gender identity/social perception of gender. The article demonstrates that gender codes in current web design are very present and aims to sensitize the topic
Female Musicians’ Visual Gender Staging in Music Videos
Get PDFThe design analysis of the media presented in this article focuses on the representation of female musicians, looking at the ways in which they stage both themselves and their gender in music videos. According to my observation, the visual portrayal of female artists has been defined by a long history of stereotypical gender representations that have to be overcome. In the music videos published by female musicians, we can observe design strategies for selfportrayal and gender staging, as well as sources of aesthetic inspirations and trends. Different oppositional design strategies are described that either blur gender, provoke the viewer or overcome stereotypical gender representations