Reviving Crafting in Digital Design

There is a constant discussion between crafts and digital design and fabrication. The use of automated machines and robotic fabrication often raise people’s fear of "being replaced". Many craft artists and enthusiasts are holding against digital fabrication and think its lacking of sympathetic touch, not only in the physical details, but also in the making process.

This research is interested in using robotics fabrication as a design tool to integrate creative crafting values in digital design, providing opportunities of being inspired by tacit knowledge during the making process. The proposed method creates a cyber-physical space with interactive communication between digital and physical models.The workflow ensures the critical points in assembly with the digital fabrication approach and allows controlled freedom of making creative changes, shifting the role of digital fabrication tools from ‘ replacing human’ to ‘assist and stimulate human’s creative work 

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A key difference between crafting and digital design occurs as the craftsmen engage material throughout the process of form-giving. The design is only finished when the making is done, so that each piece is a original, one-of-a-kind object.

Whereas in digital fabrication, most of the cases, design is separated from fabrication: parts are only assembled in the end, leaving no opportunities for adjustments before the last step. The design tuning happening in digital realm are disconnected from materiality. From this difference, I looked into and identified values in crafting that nurtures creativity:

1) Having the image of the object and engage with material throughout making

2) Having flexibilitity in making changes based on errors or with improvisation

However, there are also risks coming with it: Irregularities largely depends on the skills and experience of the craftsman, otherwise, there is a significant chance of failure.

Therefore we wonder, by integrating the digital design/ fabrication tools and methods, can we develop a design method that preserve the creative values in crafting while minimizing the risks, at the same time, changing the role of digital fabrication tools from "replacing human" to "assist and stimulate human’s creative work"

 How can we apply a “crafting with controlled freedom” design method to architecture ?

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First, I looked into adequate fabrication system or machine that would support my needs in term of sensing and flexibility. After that, I considered what kind of material would be the best to express this human machine collaboration. Once that was defined, I developed a tool to interface the machine with the material, and then the digital prototyping process that enable an adaptive model. And finally, I combined everything in our cyber physical system.

 Material and Collaborative Robot

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I opted metal rods as the material because it can be shaped constantly and repetitively both by hands and by machines, and has potential to be both structural and ornamental. 

With that in mind, in the proposed process, there’s need for automation, manual and sensing, and we find that collaborative robot can assist in all three parts: execute fabrication data and bend the rods, assist manual assembly. Also, as it can be manually pulled to desired positions, and so the position can be recorded with the embed sensors in the robot joints, the collaborative robot can also be used as a sensing tool to take physical changes into digital model.

Tool Development

The experiment setup consists of a UR5e Robot arm with a customized end effector and a bending table. The end effector functions both as a rod holder and as a reference point for getting the specific position into digital model. By assign the bending task to external bending table instead of on robot also enable a greater bending strength because the collaborative robot has a maximum force protection mechanism.

prototyping process

We start with a digital design that is fed to the fabrication system. The robot and bending table are working together to execute the fabrication data according to that model, bending the metal rod, and then move and hold in place to assist manual welding connection. The designer have opportunities to manually reconfigure the prototype in this process.  After that, the changes can be registered into the digital model by sensing the locations of the reference point on the end effector.

 Digital Model

An adaptive digital model is required to support the proposed system. With the input geometry , it will be discretised and patterns will be generated from the discretization and curve generation rules, the generated structure can be evaluated and produced while the digital model adapts to the changes occurred in prototyping process

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Design Demonstrator

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