51³ÉÈËÁÔÆæ

Course Description

Summary

The practice of functional object making is undergoing an intense transition into digital production. Additive manufacturing has been posed as the next trillion dollar business; in your lifetime you will be able to download objects, tables, chairs, clocks and manufacture them in your own home. Designers, architects, and artists are finding digital design and fabrication processes to be common ground for communication and collaboration, in large part because many new projects necessitate multidimensional thinking about form and making. Through a series of discrete exercises coupling digital fabrication and design techniques with analog processes, students in this course will gain familiarity with digital space and creative systems thinking and analog build processes. Students will design solutions to extant problems using digital modeling software; these digital designs will then be translated into functional analog objects by way of hand, machine, and robotic tools. We will observe the multiple transitions from digital to analog, with a keen eye toward understanding the qualities of each state (if indeed they can be neatly separated).