Collaborative Assembly of Digital Materials

Abstract

Current developments in design-to-production workflows aim to allow architects to quickly prototype designs that result from advanced design processes while also embedding the constraints imposed by selected fabrication equipment. However, the enduring physical separation between design space and fabrication space, together with a continuous approach to both design, via NURBs modeling software, and fabrication, through irreversible material processing methods, limit the possibilities to extend the advantages of a “digital” approach (Ward 2010), such as full editability and reversibility, to physical realizations. In response to such issues, this paper proposes a processto allow the concurrent design and fabrication of discrete structures in a collaborative process between human designer and a 6-axis robotic arm. This requires the development of design and materialization procedures for discrete aggregations, including the modeling of assembly constraints, as well as the establishment of a communication platform between human and machine actors. This intends to offer methods to increase the accessibility of discrete design methodologies, as well as to hint at possibilities for overcoming the division between design and manufacturing (Carpo 2011; Bard et al. 2014), thus allowing intuitive design decisions to be integrated directly within assembly processes (Johns 2014).