Week 10 | Digital Fabrication & Robotics

Digital fabrication technologies have revived the link between architect and builder. Through robotics, highly complex and large scale designs are being created. This lecture will discuss the reconnection of design and construction and the roles of making.

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Digital fabrication technologies has reinvented the ways in which the architect interacts with the unbuilt through digital methods. It begins with the mouse, a motif that Wigley delves into repeatedly to express the changes currently being experienced in architectural practice. He deems the mouse as an object which has the power to connect “us to the digital landscape and bring the digital in” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 52 [1].

The expressing of the “unseen and unfelt” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [2], he tells ways the mouse is “extending the capacity of the body” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [3], as it allows it to move in innovative ways, in new virtual spaces and as one. By uniting with this bridge to the virtual world, the body’s senses begin to work in new ways as it begins to bind, “two organisms into one, allowing the electrical signals in the nervous system to simulate and be simulated by the electrical signals in the computer” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 50 [4].

With this concept in mind, Wigley further establishes that the use of a mouse is extremely architectural in the ways it draws a connection between the digital space and the user. "In the moment that the mouse connects the circuitry of the body and the circuitry of the computer, the architecture in the room is hinged to the architecture in the screen" Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 52 [5].

“Man and the machine then begin to ‘co-evolve’” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 54 [6], as computers were brought into the homes, "It was the mouse itself that made the computer personal, literally domesticating the digital environment." – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 52[7]. It was also brought up that individuals are no longer expected to extend an arm as our new digitally generated interface is well within reach, with more modernised ways of controlling a screen – the touch screen.

Hence, our communication between our thoughts and the digital space has become, “more compact, even intimate, with the sliding of the fingers across the screen” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 51 [8], over time. Exploring the ways smaller actions performed on a screen – simply using our fingers – can ultimately have a greater effect over larger domains.

Finally, it is while architects inhabit these digital worlds, where the creation of innovative “thought structures” – Wigley, M (2010) Pg. 57 [9], can be implemented and optimised for generations to come.

f i g  1  :  " t h o u g h t  s t r u c t u r e s "

Exploring the concept of "thought structures" in the human brain

http://www.digitalheritage2013.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ImageArtScience5.png

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r e f e r e n c e s

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Wigley, M. (2010). "The Architecture of the Mouse." Architectural Design: EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet 80(6): 50-57.