About 2011SU_Pratt_DigitalCrafting
2011SU Pratt | Digital Crafting
ARCH522 Digital Crafting examined the procedural distinctions between craftsmanship and manufacturing; the former being the "workmanship of risk" and the latter the "workmanship of certainty". Digital Crafting operates through a framework of computational, material, and fabrication strategies that hinge on the craftspersons' skill, dexterity, and willingness to embrace the unknown, what has been termed "Risk" by David Pye in his seminal work, The Nature and Art of Workmanship .
The significance of craft-based practices in the field of architecture is a widely known and accepted tradition. The ambition of the course is to shed new light on this territory by examining the materials, tools, and procedures of craft in relation to contemporary means of numerically-controlled fabrication and the production of form. The course pedagogy centers on an association between processes of craft production, whereby the hand is the primary means of information exchange, and computational techniques, characterized by the deployment of procedural logic and iterative methodologies.
The seminar progressed through an examination of traditional handcrafts, the extraction and translation of key aspects of craft production, and the development of a series of digitally-fabricated prototypes exploring the qualitative dimension of the research. The goal of the initial research and the proceeding development was to introduce students to a set of material practices through which the inherent qualities and economies of a media would shape both process and end result. The plug-in RhinoCam served as the digital platform for a series of student experiments involving procedural toolpath creation, form-finding via material simulation, and the output of numerical-control code. As a means of subverting more typical processes of Computer-Aided Manufacturing, the morphology of the toolpath, a series of coordinate positions defining the movement of a tool during a machining operation, was contingent upon the set of material effects discovered through rigorous experimentation and prototyping.
The work on display represents the first semester of an on-going body of research conducted in a cross-listed/cross-disciplinary seminar at the Pratt Institute over the course of 15 weeks.
Participating Students:
Amir Karimpour
Eddy Sanchez
Alex Vasilyev
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Additional Information
 This is a public group.
- Accepted media types:
- Accepted content types:
- Photos / Videos
- Screenshots / Screencasts
- Illustration/Art / Animation/CGI
- Accepted safety levels:
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