Sia

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Parametric Transparency: Prototype-the Populated-Form-Object-Representation

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Exercise 7-2: Stereo Fidelity

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Replicator and Stimulator

One crucial concern of the age of digital fabrication is about Scale, that is supposed to be abundant in both size and quantity, and quality. The revolutionary aspect of the digital fabrication is the overwhelming proliferation that breaks through the limit of production capacity that welcomes an age of post-scarcity. When making is not provoked by desire or rather say market driving, the essence of the social formation will come to a radical democratization--that’s where the title “Digital Fabrication-towards a new political economy of matter” comes from.

The concept is persuasive, especially when concurring with the exercise 7: form making is no longer consuming. The material scarcity and physical constraint are detached from the aim, that once getting familiar with the machine’s procedure and boundary, the creation can become effortless; not mean that the process becomes easier, but the very effort is visible.

The effortlessness and the plentifulness can be the issue. I love the Interactive facet of digital fabrication, that as the Interactive Surface, it is tactile and experiential. However, as described another concern as Distributed, digital fabrication does have the potential and inclination of finally crossing the boundary to achieve production by the Network. Th outcome of that will be unique products that get ridden of the Capitalism, however, will also be extremely mundane ones that no longer about what I want but what we want. That is the network: shared resources, methodology, logistics, and thinking. At that point, society would not need a profession of architect, or any; person will no longer be considered well-being but a molecule of an organism.

Greenfield’s tone is prospecting since first he thinks it is a fantasy still and second he lives a capitalism and despises of it; However, the concept of the digital fabrication based on the network is promising based on its nature of effortlessness: I will use it for studio when I am exhausted since the method generates super interesting form in a short amount of time. 

However, isn’t the art the effort? On the other hand, human’s cognition is irreversible; before Instagram coming, none judge people by how many followers they get, or do they get an account. Human’s will is so fragile that can they have a voice when digitalization starts? However, undertaking the chance of redefining ownership and changing social hierarchy, the world made of digital fabrication sounds unnecessarily a bad one.

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Exercise 7-1: Stereo Fidelity

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Material as a Special Concern

This essay addresses on three parts of the materiality: the measuring method, the structuring body, and responsive nature, of it. As in a stance of paying most attention to the form during the UG, I first look for the reason that this article almost establishes material treck as the next main trend of architecture.

The central argument tells that architecture as a layered assembly has direct formal relevance to its materiality: material has a potential to build up a responsive machine to bridge the communication between the architecture and the environment. The point here is that material is supposed to be understood not only as a physical essence but as an element of linked surroundings: environmental responsiveness as pressure, atmospheric attributes as light, and also the manufacturing process. MSMS introduced as a group intend to better understand this relation is summarized into 3 stages of learning: tooling and observing the material behavior, exploring computational methodologies to understand the material logistics, and finally embedding the specific into a spatial material system to let the parts interact.

The digital control over the feedback loop is shown in the project of the Glass Cast, happen to be the one of three I picked on the reading of RTM series. The digital computation enables the control of the inputs and outputs; the simulation experiments accelerate the progression of the research and effectively lead to the outcomes. The Cast Glass is an elegant example that breaks through the conventional way of thinking glass, explore the architecture through the manufacturing process.

The most fascinating part of the reading is the explanation of how the understanding of the material in a comprehensive level will reflect on the overall design. Also, the structural organization and the sensing integral which is tactile for each other is where Functionalism comes to a common ground--the similar part-to-whole relation is also mentioned in the introduction of Function by Adrain Forty. Understanding of the force will facilitate the form-finding; I really wonder how the study of the material “will introduce a new way of drawing. (Alquist, Thün, Newell, Velikov 23)”

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Affordance, Constraints, Props, and Jigs

The concepts mentioned in the three readings this week all concern about the rethinking of the process of involving machine into our design or making. There is one worry that the more sophisticated the system is, the more loss of our state of being and thinking. Also, the efficiency the machine brings up may result in more product but less iteration. Also, the logistics used by the specific machine may lead to a degeneration of skills, and that skill may include creativity. 

Also, Crawford mentions the error of commission and omission that we may become complacent when using a machine: we trust the technology and the problems are generated due to the reliance. Thus, we should pay attention to the material specificity and process itself, since we human, are critical thinkers. The awareness is necessary when engaging an activity with machines. 

On the other hand, mastering does not exist in the field of the machine, because the product we produce is also a feedback from the machine. It is a repetitive process that never ends. That the interface development should be considered seriously. For example, when we do the robotic exercise, the interface of the machine integrate me as part of the machine. The order requires a person to take active control that keep the machine run safely, and the task is clear for everyone. Since our group had trouble figuring saving problem and I was already good at the task, I operated the board tens of times that night, that I felt myself a jig called “safety control.” Thus, the interface development comes vastly significant that it is supposed to simplify the machine operating but really becomes a tool, a method to express design.

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Research Through Making?

Having read through Monica’s proposal of RTM that aims at gathering more funding for the architecture, I realize that the academic architecture exists in the no-funding land. However, the method is confusing somehow about what is the reason that most funding goes to humanity or problem-solving studies? RTM wants to integrate two ways together to achieve attention absorbing, but is there also a possibility of dividing architecture into the two specific strategies into the later stage of learning instead? One of the reasons that architecture students or architects in the industrial or economic market can’t find their positions is that the stance is missing: what our roles are in erecting physical structures--none tells how to deal with multiple parties of interest simultaneously. Moreover, the uncertainty comes originally from design constitution, that which weighs more in our design: art or humanity or problem-solving. If we selves don’t know the answer, how the world pay us back in investment?

However, The methodology of RTM is meaningful since the product is applicable. Such as the Glass Cast in 2012 (1), the experiment of the form of a traditional material gains new possibility for designing the shell an inhabitable structure; simply speaking, it arouses the beauty of the material that hasn’t been discovered before. The project of Social Sensory Surfaces in 2015 (2) engages effort in interdisciplinary approaches that can collectively achieve a degree of artificial intelligence to speak to the humanity: material, form, computational design, media, display strategy, all together offer a sensory interactive experience. The knit architecture in 2014 (3) displays how design strategies can vary when encountering different material.

Even though I don’t think RTM is solving the rooted problem in the architectural industry, Research Through Making is gaining potential for Design Through Making. Nevertheless, the binary here is that the problem-solving part is undervalued here. Is that the complacency of designers?

[thachphung-blog]

      In the first experiment, our group Arvinder,Sia and I want to use Picasso light drawing as an example to argue that robots as a device to imitate human’s movement- not conceptual thinking. This photograph implies the metaphor which robotics and technology can play as a device to serve human need, and we the people who control the machines and our world.

      The second photograph shows our group design for self-portraits. We use robots as the tool to express our playful thinking. Yet, robots will be perfect and accurate to imitate human tasks if we put many thought and understand clearly how to control them. We take picture of ourselves, trace them in Rhino, apply in Grasshopper, finish the drawings by robot’s arm and record the result. After couple hours struggling in learning how to use robot, we know that all kind of machines need to be researched and learned carefully before using them and we do not want to be “the monkey next to the buddha”, we want robots to be this “monkey” and imitate our conceptual thinking.

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Exercise 6-1&2: Robotic Toolpaths

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Replicating Pablo Picasso’s “light paintings” (photographed by Gjon Mili in the South of France (1949)) at the Taubman College of Architecture through the use of a robotic arm.  

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Exercise 6-2

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Digital Culture in Architecture Realm

Antoine Picon talks the role of digital culture in the architectural prospect. The systemic analysis has ad- and disadvantages: it grasps the overall acknowledgment of urban process better due to its powerful processor and memory, but also removes some sophistication of human element that results in an oversimplified scenario. The way the digital culture is described seems more practical rather than conceptual: cybernetics as a solution to the planning discipline. He describes a lot of scenes happened in the United States and world history and how the application of computational approach would solve the problem. 

The basic argument is how digital culture serves society and architecture in ways of pattern, system, and network. However, link back to Lynn, who metaphor computer as a pet, which can produce unanticipated reaction but also needed to be disciplined. Sure it can serve, it can easily produce pattern used for housing or urban landscape like he describes the history of the 1970s;; there should be more consciousness in the process.

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Exercise 5-2: Field-Figure. Figure-Field (Symbol Look)

Producer: Arvinder Singh, Sia Ma

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Exercise 5-2: Field-Figure. Figure-Field (Object Look)

Producer: Arvinder Singh, Sia Ma

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Exercise 5-2: Field-Figure. Figure-Field (Pattern Look)

Producer: Arvinder Singh, Sia Ma

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Derivative, not Variation?

Lynn introduces the concept of animate form. It is models of organization that does not devastate the essence of architecture as the dedication towards permanence but instead provides an ethics of stasis that builds on top but maintain the same basis rather than altering.

The form is composed of an envelope and dynamic context it situates; That’s where comes the necessity of an animate approach of a dynamic organization. Despite the inertness of the formal purity, the environment does change. Then, the reference system changes, and the convention of perceiving and understanding space changes. The virtual comes in by the assumption with the digital space, which dominates the force and motion only in relevancy of the previous ones: “a superimposition or sequence of static forms is put into relation such that the viewer resolves multiple states through the initiation of optical motions...Stasis is a concept which has been intimately linked with architecture in at least five important ways, including 1)permanence, 2)usefulness, 3)typology, 4)procession, and 5) verticality.”(Lynn 13)

Then the essay employs the rest of the words to explain how animate form works. Lynn generally holds a positive attitude towards the computer-aided technique that this would help to retool and even rethink about architecture because now the form breaks through the rigid reference system of stereometric projection and perspective. Beyond the limitation, the architectural design can be more abstract, ideological and omnipotent.

However, then how could Lynn further explains the essence of permanence? Where does the derivative of the derivative of the derivative go? Technology does hold its charm, but does human capable enough to show the charm of humanity? Based on Lynn point, the definition of architecture should alter to a manifestation of the status quo rather than humanity.

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Exercise 5-1

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Exercise 5-1

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Exercise 4-2: Volumetric Assembly

Cooperated by Deborah Ploski, Audrey Hunt

Intersecting and penetrating