Seminar Description
This course examined and presented the fields of craft and computation as fields of scholarly and creative inquiry to expand the scope of design practice and critically engage with technological change. Advocating for exploratory, experimental, and improvisational processes of inquiry, the course seeks to renegotiate designing and making as new and exciting sites of creative, socio-technical inquiry that imaginatively and materially reconfigures practices and theories of craft, computation, and technology in design. We approached this seminar with a sense of wonder associated with the creative intensities and impulses of play that “aim to rupture, unsettle, animate, and reverberate [rather] than report and represent” preexisting theories, practices and methodologies (Vannini, 2015). This semester, wood carving was our site of inquiry - manual and digital carving.
Weekly readings, writing, discussions, and assignments familiarized students with themes, concepts, and methods coming out of computation, craft studies, and science technology and society studies (STS) for contributions to design, architecture, and other creative fields. Topics included practices and theories as they relate to: making and repair; situated embodied knowledge; tools; people, technology, and society.
------------------------- Project by Katherine Bennett ------------------
"I hear you. Stories in Wood"
"Trees are writers, and readers. They write and read their histories in their bodies. Underground, tree roots send and receive chemical messages written into their DNA. Above ground, trees record their life stories in grains of wood, the textured lines and rings of vascular tissues, the dark blotches of hardened scars. The English verb “record” itself combines meanings of remembering and retelling with the cutting and classification of wood. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes an example from 1797: “All that they had done was to measure the wood and re-cord a very small part of it” (OED Online). The word, like the language of Wood, represents how people and other beings and phenomena also take part in the lives and posthumous re-cordings of trees."
"In this project, I combine print and digital media—ink and wires and code and an Arduino micro-controller—to read aloud these stories written in and about wood. I trace the grains of “exotic” and “domestic” veneers with a sharp, ink-loaded quill pen, incising and darkening the striations and deformations as I go. The ink, a conductive carbon formula that I developed in previous projects, acts with electricity and wood as a microphone to transcribe the veneers’ language into atonal re-verberations." - text by Katherine Bennett
Below: Wood veneer reading aloud its stories and histories
------------------- Project by RayVonn Whitehead --------------------
"CAD and the 21st Century Architect"
"The advent of CAD technologies marked a fundamental change in the design process. Conceived as tool to aid in design, CAD technologies sought to remove the “dirty” work of the process thus allowing the user to focus solely on development. Coons theorized the software would be viewed as an extension of the human mind, preferring design to be categorized as a verb describing a non-machine activity. Today, CAD technology dominates the workplace creating new methods of presentation and design. These new methods create a neutral sphere around the field allowing individuals who lack the more traditional aspects of design (drawing, sketching model building) to seamlessly work in the craft. In this paper, I examine [Coon's theory by using my projects and experiences] as a case study to analyze CAD as a neutral space for designers." - text by RayVonn Whitehead
---------------------------- Project by Eleni Kroi ----------------------------
"Language in Urban Design"
Urban design requires one to convey their design as data, as money, as conceptual drawings, and construction drawings. In this paper, I want investigate the ways architects and urban designers communicate and whether there is a disconnect among fields working on one project. Is the urban designer the coordinator and the one who overlooks the design process from schematic design to fully built? During what part of the design process is there the most miscommunication? Is communication the factor that sets the hierarchy in a project? And if it is, what form of communication allows for the hierarchy? I will investigate my case study of Kronberg Urbanists Architects proposal to learn about the dynamic between urban designer, civil engineer, and developer to understand the verbal and visual communication roles of each in design projects.
