The changing market, global realities, distributed networks, and rate of change of technological innovation has affected the practice of architecture. Designers are turning to the manufacturing sector to provide custom made solutions for the built world. As a result, collaboration with industry is happening earlier in the design process and teams of diverse expertise are assembled to accomplish the total design through production process. Digital information lies at the center of these collaborative exchanges. As such, skills with coordinating the complex management of digital information are necessary.

The 12 credit-hour Certificate Program in Digital Design and Fabrication is designed to prepare students to develop a skill set with digital information, while at the same time directly engage industry partners in an open and collaborative environment. A combination of on-campus, off-campus, and long-distance/online course modules are geared toward professionals and non-traditional students.

This graduate certificate course framework allows for credits to apply to a 30 credit-hour Master of Architecture II degree (post-professional). The Certificate framework is flexible to allow students to customize their M.Arch II course of study to specialize in Digital Design and Fabrication and related topics. Course credits may also be applicable as electives requirements for Ball State’s MArch Professional program, and MS in Historic Preservation.

Aligned with Ball State’s Department of Architecture and i.M.A.D.E (the Institute for Digital Fabrication), this Certificate and graduate course work is inherently interdisciplinary and is targeted at design professionals, fabricators, and manufacturers. The bundle of courses is intended to introduce students to the interconnections between disciplines through the management of digital information, reinforcing the total design through production process. The Degree will offer a strategic advantage to professional designers and fabricators and is aligned with regional industry partnerships. By working in collaboration with industry partners on applied research projects, students gain practical real world expertise that transcends the classroom.

i.M.A.D.E has already worked with the following institutional, design, industry partners and sponsors:
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art
• The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture
• The Indianapolis Arts Center
• CASE Design, New York
• Philip Beesley Architect, Toronto
• A2SO4, Indianapolis
• SHoP, New York
• A. Zahner Metals, Kansas City
• Arrowhead Plastics Engineering (Plastics + Fiberglass Fabrication)
• David R Webb (Hardwood Veneer Supply)
• MidWest Metals (Metal Fabrication)
• Indiana Limestone Fabricators (CNC Limestone Fabrication)
• Frank Miller Lumber (Hardwood Supply)
• Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen’s Association
• Indiana Limestone Institute of America

Other Digital Design and Fabrication offerings are currently being developed.
Fill out this form to submit inquiries and receive updates about our program :: http://www.i-m-a-d-e.org/subscribe
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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is a “certificate”?

A graduate certificate is not defined as a degree by Ball State’s Graduate School; rather, it is a focused collection of courses (12 credit-hours) that, when completed, affords the student some record of coherent academic accomplishment in the focused topics of Digital Design + Fabrication. A certificate caters to those who wish to “reboot” their design skill sets without undertaking a full 30 credit-hour Master’s degree. Students receive a printed certificate acknowledging successful completion of the certificate. The student’s official transcript will also indicate successful completion of the program. Students must achieve at least a 3.0 GPA in the program, and no course with a grade below a 2.0 can be counted toward the certificate.

2. Do I have to enroll as a full-time student for the Certificate in Digital Design + Fabrication?

No, students may be enrolled full or part-time in a certificate program. The Program affords much flexibility for those with busy schedules or working full-time.

3. What if I choose, mid-stream, to pursue a Master’s degree at Ball State?

This is not a problem; students may apply credit from certificate programs to a Master’s degree at Ball State (pending admission into a graduate degree program).

4. Are Graduate Assistantships available if I pursue a Certificate in Digital Design + Fabrication?

No, unfortunately it is Ball State’s policy that graduate students enrolled only in a certificate program may not hold a Graduate Assistantship.

5. What is the course framework for the Certificate program?

The Certificate program consists of 9 core credits:

ARCH581 – Digital Design/Fabrication Foundations 1 (3 credit hours):
Foundations course introducing surface modeling and design methods and tools for CNC fabrication. Initiates a basic understanding of surface geometry, construction history, fabrication strategies, and data extraction/translation through a series of hands-on, iterative modeling and digital fabrication exercises.

ARCH593 – Digital Design/Fabrication Applications Seminar (3 credit hours):
Design to fabrication seminar focusing students on collaborative immersive projects and discussing theoretical digital technology issues. Students work in teams with faculty, industry partners, and material suppliers to develop applied research problems from inception to full-scale prototype through digital design and fabrication techniques.

ARCH594–Immersive Practicum Studio (3 credit hours):
Self-directed, entrepreneurial, creative projects performed under the guidance of faculty advisors and in collaboration with industry partners. Students are responsible for developing original ideas, products, and systems into commodities with potential value for product spin-off or business incubation.

Additionally, the last 3 credits are from successfully completing one of the electives listed below:

ARCH582 – Digital Design/Fabrication Foundations II (3 credit hours):
Foundations course introducing advanced computational design and analysis tools. Topics and skills covered include time-based modeling, scripting, parametric and informational modeling, and computational performance simulation. Skills are developed through a series of case studies and human-scale design, optimization, and fabrication projects.

ITMFG568 — Inquiries into 3D Prototyping (3 credit hours):
Introduction to an inquiry-based, iterative approach to 3 dimensional laser scanning, rapid prototyping technologies, laser machining, and CNC machining; students use R&D methods to produce and refine digital 3d product designs and manufacture prototypes.

ITEDU697 – Problems in Technology Education (3 credit hours):
Independent study in advanced industrial or professional techniques.

6. How do I apply to the Certificate in Digital Design + Fabrication program?

The application process and requirements are the same as any graduate degree. These steps are outlined here:

http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CollegesandDepartments/CAP/Programs/Architecture/Programs/Masters/Apply/MArchIIChecklist.aspx

Applicants pursuing only a certificate will be admitted as non-degree students. Students who complete a certificate, however, can apply these hours to a degree-granting program upon receiving department approval.

Ball State University “speedwaystudio” designs addition scheme for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum

INNOVATE :: In celebration of the centennial of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Ball State University graduate students in architecture accepted the challenge of exploring new ways of revealing the innovation, story, and heart of the Indianapolis 500 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As a part of the College of Architecture and Planning’s Master of Architecture degree program, a six-week architecture design studio project included proposing a hypothetical renovation and expansion of the existing Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum. The intentions were to spark a discussion about how architecture can align with the legacy of innovation inspired by the Speedway and display the incomparable collection of the Hall of Fame Museum.  To conclude the project, the students presented their team-based design scheme at IMS and presented the museum with a scaled model mounted in a digital designed and fabricated kiosk.

REVEAL :: The exterior of the designed addition celebrates the fabrication methodologies seen throughout the history of the automotive industry as the interior begins to reveal all aspects of racing history and innovation. The building, collection, and narrative of the brickyard’s incredible impact on our Hoosier heritage is gradually revealed as the visitor approaches and circulates through the space. Upon entering the museum, visitors are guided through two paths of exhibits in which cars are positioned, manipulated, and exploded to display an intimate level of detail. The goal of this new exhibit space is to provide a more in-depth experience taking you, the visitor, from the stands to the driver’s seat.

SPECIAL THANKS :: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum, particularly Ellen Bireley, Terry Gunter, and Mel Harder.

STUDENT TEAM :: Jared Burt, Majdi Felah, Matt Flamm, Eric Gerding, Mo Han, Madeline LaPlante, Adam Miller, Kevin McCurdy

FACULTY :: Kevin Klinger and Mahesh Senagala

EXTERNAL CRITICS :: Kevin Frank and Alexi Karavokiris [RTKL Associates, Chicago]; Matty Bennett and Bendan Fox [SEQUENCES DESIGN, Indianapolis]; Donna Sink [MWHarris, Indianapolis]; Harold Baker [Harold Baker Architects, Brazil, IN]; Torrey Dawley [Sandpaper Studio, Indianapolis]; David Russick [Indianapolis Museum of Art]

Indianapolis Star Article: here.

After the shortlist of finalists were announced, the team presented to a jury for final round of judging. Final results from this jury will be announced on May 20.

More info here (Ball State University press release): http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1370,7273-850-63996,00.html

In spring 2009, An Inconvenient Studio was conducted at Ball State University with an aim to innovate through active strategies in environmental design (in distinction to passive design), digital technologies, robotics, interactive architecture, and collaborative design approaches that challenge conventional models of studio education. Known by many names (interactive architecture, responsive architecture, smart environments, intelligent buildings, situated technologies, and robotic architecture), these new technologies hold tremendous promise for the future of architecture.

The studio was given an opportunity to self-organize and operate around a self-defined mission and brand, as well as a set of advanced technology and design topics. Inconveniently, no preconceived design projects were given to the students. No deadlines were provided. Instead, a vertical studio consisting of 13 graduate and undergraduate students and two instructors was turned into an entrepreneurial think tank (inconvenient studio 2009) with an organizational structure that evolved through practical as well as academic needs. The students were asked to come up with projects and project time lines through collective dialog, exploration and consensus as well as developing and choosing roles for themselves for tasks such as direction, fundraising, archiving and recording work, and public relations. The studio needed to be an agile and adaptive organization to maximize its reliance on the collective intelligence—identifying problems through research and developing proposed solutions through design. As an organization, the studio was allowed to consider failure and conflict as inherent conditions of any system. Instead of handling them top-down, the studio was allowed to go through the natural cycles of learning from failure and conflict-resolution as part of the learning process.

The studio attempted to function as a network without boundaries, expanding the reach of the institution and embracing the larger world into the fold of knowledge creation. In this sense, the group was seen as an organized collective enabled by communication, information, and design technologies to innovate, not only architectural projects, but the architecture of ideas, processes, techniques, and materials. Managing the complexities of a holistic process for designing that fosters team-oriented and multi-disciplinary design innovation in a complexly connected world, requires the embracing of new technologies and organizational “experiments” in academia or in practice.

Understanding the transformative potentials of new technologies requires experimentation within an organization that is able to form and reform by opportunistic alignments and a resilience to adapt to change. All members of the think tank were encouraged to leverage ideas, people and learning from anywhere in the world through their individual networks. This studio benefited from many alignments with multi-disciplinary and external collaborators, as portions of this “inconvenient” studio were taught in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Fabrication, CASE Design, University of Waterloo and Pratt Institute. At the end of the semester, the students put together a small public exhibition of their work at Ball State’s Indianapolis Center, along with chronicling their learning experiences in a book (link forthcoming).

For information on some of the final products of An Inconvenient Studio, see the links below:

“Arcus Animus”
“Morpholuminescence”

We also think that the students’ process is equally interesting. Brief descriptions of the studio’s earlier work and prototypes follow below.

“LEGObotics”
Initial knowledge-building began through structured play exercises–brief open-ended provocations were provided, followed by making and testing, and finally “playful” demonstrations of the “works-in-progress”–all in very quick fashion. At the beginning, in the spirit of iterative prototyping, experimenting, and failing, the studio was tasked to explore the creation of prototypes or “Legobots” that could behave according to a small set of stimuli and rules. Tasks were given for the organism to perform without prescribing how the tasks were to be accomplished. LEGO NXT kits were useful for developing these prototypes quickly–the kits have predesigned connection systems, are easily assembled, modular, re-configurable, and packaged with sensors, microcontrollers, and actuators all driven with a visual programming interface. Failures were abundant as the students quickly found the limitations of these kits. For instance, sensing ranges for light, sound, and proximity had to be discovered and carefully controlled by physical location and direction of sensors, as well as by calibrating and fine-tuning the programming.

Interestingly the small teams quickly customized the LEGO kits, including modifying and integrating mobile phones (with blue-tooth technologies), affixing lights and drawing instruments, or creating several Legobots that worked in tandem to accomplish particular tasks or behaviors. The LEGO NXT software allowed the students to program the Legobotic behaviors through a visual interface without the burden of learning a particular scripting language. An important point to note is that most of the students had little or no programming experience when they started the studio. This interface provided a robust framework for beginning students to program and test complex behaviors while introducing the fundamentals of scripting, such as linking numeric parameters to functions, creating conditional statements, and looping–all enabled by quickly testing the outcomes. Similar to the LEGO programming, Grasshopper modeling was used as an introduction or precursor to slightly more advanced procedural modeling using Rhino Script (introduced later in the semester). The parametric capabilities of Grasshopper helped some of the students design custom, laser-cut components to extend the capacity of the LEGO NXT kits for specific behaviors such as “aiming” the directionality of sound sensors.

With a thorough working knowledge of the LEGO systems, the teams realigned to create scaled-up, reactive prototypes able to inhabit specific sites and engage human behavior. Scaling up involved many more difficulties for the student teams such as amplifying forces and movements, while minimizing weight. Initial ideas were drawn or modeled in parallel with drafting statements about each team’s project intentions. While parametric modeling was initially used by some of the teams to model a first design iteration and simulate it’s behaviors, the students quickly met the limitations of their software under strict time constraints. In these cases, physical prototyping proved to be the critical method of driving the design and innovation process. Most, if not all, of the design changes and development occurred through the building, testing, and modifying of full-working prototypes. This iterative feedback loop greatly enhanced the students’ awareness of each project’s performance related to materials, weight, scale, forces, and movement. The projects that underwent the most prototyping, from very early in the process, were the most successful in terms of negotiating site, kinetics, detailing, and experience.

“Bloom”
One such project, entitled “Bloom,” sought to blur the distinction between canopy and enclosure with opening and closing light-weight petals which hovered over head. Crafted from steam-bent wood and rice paper, the petals contracted to define a small, intimate space within an otherwise open atrium by sensing human occupation while interpreting sound levels. The contractions were driven by a small servo motor via cabling and gears–the actuating system was not entirely resolved, but worked sufficiently for demonstration. The device, itself, drew a sizable crowd for demonstration. As a prototype, it served it’s purpose well by engaging the audience physically, but also engaging the audience’s imaginations. The “Bloom” was critiqued, not as a final product, but rather as a snapshot within a larger work-in-progress. Speculating on what the Bloom might “become”, the critique quickly became an impromptu brain-storming session about possible future trajectories for the idea. Some speculations even shifted scales for ideas from very small “products” to massive urban-scale interventions. In this context, students discover the value of critique and criticism, not as measures of right or wrong, pass or fail, but rather as essential feedback mechanisms for design and innovation.

“Twist”
A different project, entitled “Twist”, used custom-made drive belts to twist stretched-cloth panels in patterns. This project attached to a linear expanse of windows and sensed passers-by in an adjacent hallway, twisting and opening sequences of panels to reveal sunlight and views to the surrounding campus. The project consisted of a modular, expandable kit of parts that were laser cut from acrylic. All connections were achieved without traditional hardware, underscoring the importance of tolerances and details. This modular, “plug-in” design and assembly logic was key to testing and improving the installation’s performance. Sets of components formed modular assembly systems such as framing systems, stretching systems, pivoting systems, twisting systems, etc. If one of these systems failed to perform, particular system components could be redesigned and fabricated quickly, while ready-made to plug back into the larger whole. This partitioning of functions and systems enabled adaptations to particular component designs with minimal interference or redesign of the entire prototype.
During design reviews the students were faced with many questions: could it get bigger? is it a product or commodity to be sold in the market place? perhaps it could become a facade system? could it be used as a retrofit for existing buildings? could messages be printed or projected onto it? After reflection from these critiques, the larger, over-arching question became entrepreneurial in spirit—how could this project potentially generate revenue? This is no trivial question, in fact it is an inconvenient question to be posed in a design studio setting. In the spirit of innovation, the generation of intellectual property should be seen as educationally and financially valuable opportunities to engage business and entrepreneurship programs in interdisciplinary partnerships–the instructors intend to experiment with this in future studios.

Students:
Deepak Baniya
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Luke Christen
Brandon Hoopingarner
Brad Horn
Paul Konwinski
Yevgen Monakhov
Brianna Newton
Kyle Perry
Daisy Winkler

Faculty:
Mahesh Senagala
Joshua Vermillion

Collaborators + Partners:
CASE Design – Dave Fano, Steve Sanderson, Federico Negro
Philip Beesley, University of Waterloo / Philip Beesley Architect, Inc
Brad Rothenberg, Pratt Institute
Ball State Indianapolis Center

Donors for the Morpholuminescence project:
Buente|Buente Architects
Capstone Real Estate
LHI Lighting Sales
Ridout Plastics
The Estopinal Group
VPS Architecture

Selected work from An Inconvenient Studio:

Philip Beesley from Waterloo Architecture/Philip Beesley Architect Inc. visited Ball State along with Brad Rothenberg of Pratt Institute to conduct a physical computing workshop for An Inconvenient Studio. The resulting installation from this four-day workshop is a kinetic mesh system entitled Arcus Animus.
The hanging, layered meshwork composed of impact-resistant acrylic, bamboo, and mylar components reacts to human occupation interpreted by arrayed proximity sensors. These physical reactions consist of “shaking” and “waving” movements actuated pneumatically using solenoid valves and custom air muscles, and controlled by Arduino microcontollers with processing-based code development.
Arcus Animus is a recent incarnation from a long lineage of mesh and actuator installations at Waterloo Architecture and Philip Beesley Architect Inc. from 2006-09, and we kindly thank Philip and Brad for their tremendous energies throughout the workshop, as Arcus Animus was fabricated and constructed.
Additionally, Philip Beesley delivered a lecture at Ball State entitled: “Partial Objects.” In his lecture, Beesley presented a series of his recent field-oriented installations and offered a post-humanist cultural context for this work. Illustrated projects included the Hylozoic Soil series, an immersive interactive reef construction  composed of overlapping flexible meshworks populated with kinetic ‘pores’, recently installed in Montreal, Linz and Madrid, and the 2008 UCLA installation Endothelium, a delicate skeletal tripod-field powered by densely massed organic power units and organized as unit-clusters forming a continuous lattice outfitted with faint signal-lure lights, microprocessor-controlled burrowing agents and space-filling filter packs.
Philip Beesley is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo who practices digital media art and experimental architecture in Toronto. His work in the last two decades has focused on field-oriented sculpture and landscape installations, with extensions in stage design and buildings. His projects in the past several years have increasingly worked with immersive digitally fabricated lightweight ‘textile’ structures, and the most recent generations of his work feature interactive kinetic systems that use dense arrays of microprocessor, sensors and actuator systems.   He is co-director of the Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing at Waterloo. He was educated in visual art at Queen’s University, in technology at Humber College, and in architecture at the University of Toronto. He was a member of art and performance collaboratives Open Series and Studio Six/Kataraque in Kingston and the George Meteskey Ensemble in New York. Periods of study were undertaken in Rome at the Vatican and the American Academy and in New York with the Wooster Group. Prior to beginning his practice he apprenticed in instrument making and in lighting design.  Distinctions for his work include the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), Governor-General’s  and  Dora Mavor Moore Awards. He is the 2009 recipient of Fundacion Telefonica’s VIDA Award. 

Ball State Installlation/Development Workshop:
Philip Beesley, University of Waterloo/PBAi
Brad Rothenberg, Pratt Institute

An Inconvenient Studio:
Deepak Baniya
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Luke Christen
Brad Horn
Brandon Hoopingarner
Paul Konwinski
Yevgen Monakhov
Brianna Newton
Daisy Winkler

Faculty:
Mahesh Senagala
Joshua Vermillion 

The Manufacturing Material Effects Exhibition, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, framed and displayed the design and material production work of leading international designers and fabricators who participated in the Manufacturing Material Effect international symposium, and subsequent book release from Routledge Press. Designed, fabricated, and installed by a design studio working closely with industry partners from local wood, aluminum, limestone, and plastics industries, the exhibition closely examined collaborative design and production practices from around the globe based on innovative and experimental processes of material exploration.

Each component of the exhibition display system was custom designed and fabricated. A digitally-fabricated plywood armature system was developed and optimized for efficient nesting, fabrication, and shipping in order to minimize material waste. Rear-illuminated acrylic panels were vacuum formed over CNC-milled wood patterns in close collaboration with a local plastics manufacturer. All connections and joints were facilitated by custom designed and laser cut aluminum clips. Digital files were exchanged with local limestone industry partners for the 3 axis CNC production of stone bases. Full-scale mock-ups facilitated the choreography of the vacuum forming process and connection details.

In order to test lighting effects, the studio deployed a variety of methods—both, computationally, and physically. Entire armature bays were fabricated at full-scale with lighting and wiring in order to optimize the lighting design. Simultaneously, the studio simulated the overall lighting effects using photometric light renderings and false-color illuminance studies. This coupling of digital and physical outputs allowed students to understand the successes and failures in both the design and analysis techniques.

The exhibition project was assembled and installed by the student team, using a coding system for identifying each unique component. Additionally, an interactive, touch-screen informational kiosk was developed and installed by Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts. The design process was richly enhanced by actively engaging and participating with the manufacturing process, along with the vetting of design schemes by industry partners, which led to a design process that was truly informed by production, cost, and material considerations, and fostering an innovative collaborative relationship between design and making.

Student Team:
Amber Agan
Matt Amore
Elizabeth Boone
Adam Buente
Lena Dodson
Brandon Hoopingarner
Joe Intriago
Adam James
Kyle Perry
Ross Smith
Rob Thompson

Faculty:
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion

Partners:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts
Arrowhead Plastic Engineering
Indiana Limestone Fabricators
Mid-West Metal Products
Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen’s Association
David R. Webb Company
Amos-Hill Associates
Ball State Digital Corps
Laird Plastics

Process Photos

Stephen Deters from UCLA visited i.M.A.D.E as a research fellow to conduct a 3-day studio workshop to examine the performative capacities of materials–specifically, $20,000 worth of donated hardwood veneer. The resulting Bodhi Tree is comprised of laser-cut veneer components created specifically for curving, twisting, and layering in order to negotiate structural capacity with aesthetic sensibilities of lightness, patterning, and light/shadow.

A lecturer at UCLA, Stephen Deters has practiced architecture in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  His experience covers a broad scope of building typologies through all stages of design and construction, from furniture to skyscrapers to urban design.  He has worked in the offices of Eric Owen Moss (LA), Kohn Pedersen Fox (NY), Pei Cobb Fried (NY), Beyer Blinder Belle (NY) and Fujikawa Johnson Gobel (CHI).  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Architecture from the University of California Los Angeles, where he now teaches. He has also studied at the Ecole d’Architecture de Versailles (FR) and the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (AU) under Zaha Hadid.  He has been a licensed architect since 2003, and is founding principal of Deterfabrik.

The implication of ‘fabrication’ has rapidly expanded for architects, architectural researchers, and students engaging the latest digital tools: fabrication is both material and immaterial, pushing the limits of experimentation while working against the imperatives of real technology and construction imperatives as articulated by other scholars. Computer-aided design and manufacturing, once discreet applications of technology, are now part of a fluid process of designing, modeling, simulating, making, and re-making. This process is characterized as a “feedback loop”, where digital information meets critical decision-making and the design process plays out in the service of production, assembly, construction, and critical interpretation.

In this sense, fabrication is not simply a hermetic process, but an ecology that rewrites our assumptions of what to do with materials, information, and the ability to both control complexity and generate from computation. Constructing Information was a design course in which architecture students examined an environmental design problem by way of the digital feedback loop, where their efforts in applying digital design and fabrication methods were driven explicitly by material and site realities and where their work was executed, installed, and critically explored in situ. Their work raised important questions about how information and context overlay and merge, and the critical potential of visual, material, and spatial effects as part of a fabrication-oriented design problem.

In the context of a semester-long design project, students were asked to engage a design problem involving an environmental construct emphasizing the digital feedback loop as discussed above. The construct, at the schematic level, was intended to have some sort of internally directed, computational logic but was also intended to respond to a specific environmental condition and function. Over the course of the design exercise, it was this conceptual relationship within the feedback loop – between environmental effects and computational logic – that was a primary challenge in communicating ideas, designing analytically, and developing concept-integrated fabrication strategies.

Projects at the beginning of the course were authored by the seven individual students. The students were assigned on the first day of class the problem of creating a particular environmental construct, selected from the following list: wall cladding, curtain wall interior shading, suspended ceiling, privacy partition, interior passage point , skylight interior shading, overhead light diffusing screen, interior furnishing. Students were asked, in parallel with their initial schematic concept, to define the conditions of the design problem in terms of environmental effect: that is, what their object or system responded to (sunlight, artificial lighting, acoustics, ergonomics, experience, media, movement, touch, climate, or a combination). Throughout the first part of the course, computational design methods were introduced in a set of workshops, followed by a workshop presenting methods for environmental simulation related to the set of criteria mentioned above. Sites for the projects remained intentionally abstract, to allow students to narrow their conceptual focus on particular effects and relationships.

Throughout the first half of the semester, students continued to work individually through the following stages of the feedback loop, introducing their own imperatives and objectives as projects evolved. In parallel, topics and workshops were explored ranging in subjects such as visualization, rules-based and parametric design, environmental analysis, and fabrication. In the final stage of project development students assembled in two teams and were assigned to select a site, within or around the college’s building, in which to interrogate and install their designs. In the final stages of project development, project commonalities, strengths, and weaknesses became clear and the introduction of the projects to real-world fabrication constraints and sites made design revisions inevitable. In the spirit of the feedback loop and process-based working model, the students transitioned from seven individual projects to two project hybrids, where students collaborated in teams.

Perhaps a consequence of this collaboration based on process, the students elected to form a single ‘super team’ in the final weeks of the process. An important contributor to this decision was the availability of a large amount of usable material scraps from a previous project, which had resulted in each team working towards adopting similar material strategies. Weeks of looking at each other’s projects seemed to attract the students towards a common conclusion, with individual students in the end citing particular interests (scripting, solving construction details, studying material strategies) in contributing to the final process. This underscores the emphasis of the course towards design and fabrication process over a premeditated ‘object’; by way of the feedback loop, the focus on iterative development over end product encouraged integrative, collaborative problem solving over homogenized, individual expression.

Project Description
The final project occupies a small section of curtain wall windows in an elevated but public section of the architecture building. Overall, the students were able to identify many opportunities for experiencing the site from inside and outside, understanding its potential to shift with the movement of viewers through the space and their movement relative to the time of day. Relative to shifting times of day, solar geometry and daylighting could relate to project geometry as perceived during the daytime, while a projection system installed on the interior could illuminate the project after dusk. The geometry of the sun, sky, and projected light allows the project to respond to light and the movement of viewers continuously throughout the day.

An array of variably extruded and trimmed polygons establishes the project geometry, generated from a script that, provided with a simple volumetric boundary, first divides this volume into variegated cells. Through the script, each horizontal row of cells is extruded in response to a particular solar orientation, allowing the clear admittance of sunlight on key days and mixing sun and shadow while transitioning between these days. The randomized distortion of each cell, also part of the script, related to project’s intended effects relative to light and material.

The students intended to create ‘distortion’ of light and thus spatial effect, and early in the project it was recognized that neither flat planes of material or a regularized grill of cells could provide this distortion – in each case light was either washing the material surface completely or passing through the cells too completely. This reality was discovered when the chosen material – ‘milky’ white acrylic – was examined in projected light. This particular material reacted to light most intensely when its orientation was shifting – at the corners of geometries, and when the incidence of light could change (i.e. from grazing to direct) among adjacent surfaces. Distorting the cells through randomization and shifting their orientation within the array exposed more corners and surface variation to view, and could increase the spatial effect of the project. Scripting allowed the students to easily experiment with scaling cells, varying the orientation and extent of the cell array without rebuilding digital models and revising the intricate geometric relationships between site, solar geometry, and structure.

The acrylic used in the project was part of a usable volume of scrap material that the students found could be processed into smaller plates for in-house laser cutting. The production method for each cell involved unfolding from the model, nesting in cut sheets, and labeling. Finished parts were then organized and bent using printed templates and a single-element plastic heater. Scoring the acrylic involved creating a rasterized gradient at each seam, which could be processed by the laser cutter as a pattern of pulses which, in turn, could cut a precise, three-dimensional groove in the acrylic. The mounting detail used silicon rubber suction cups and clear acrylic tabs which snapped into each cell: a system which could be manufactured using the laser cutters, easily optimized with slight modifications to snap ‘teeth’, and allowed a loose fit when attached to glass to absorb remaining geometric discrepancies.

Working with real prototypes, understanding the capabilities for forming the material, and organizing the project around site conditions enabled these realizations in the design process – a direct manifestation of the feedback loop from design to fabrication.

Students:
Taf Bwititi
Kyle Perry
Adam James
Kevin McCurdy
Jorge Intriago
Nick Satterfield
Nick Respecki

Faculty:
Michael Gibson
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion