The innovative and experimental opportunities inherent in digital fabrication are myriad and exciting, so the first question that confronts a designer may be simply: Where do I begin? There are no hard and fast rules about when to use digital tools and technologies for architectural design—or, indeed, which tools to use—and given the overwhelming number of different techniques available to the designer it may often appear a daunting premise. This is particularly pertinent where inexperienced designers seek to engage with complex computer software, which rather than assisting or even driving their design ideas appears to do the opposite, thereby limiting creativity and sometimes resulting in considerable frustration! Therefore, it is important to understand from the outset that these methods form part of a more expansive “toolkit” for architectural design which also includes traditional modes of inquiry and representation such as sketching, drawing, physical modelmaking, and painting. It is not the intention here to curb any ambition on behalf of the designer—quite the reverse—but to understand that there are different degrees to which these techniques may be used within a design process. The seductive aspects of some of the digital technologies featured may imply a mere “touch of a button” approach to design, but the reality of investment in terms of time, effort, and cost should not be ignored.
Perhaps the most obvious shift in the behavior of a designer using digital fabrication techniques lies at the very core of making. In order to be able to fabricate something, we need to first convert digital data from design software into a format that CAD/CAM machines can understand. This necessitates designers developing a degree of understanding as to how these translation processes work, so they may best exploit the machines’ capabilities. One of the objectives of this book, therefore, is to enable those designers seeking to incorporate digital technologies into their practice, whether partially or comprehensively, to be more discriminating in their choice of appropriate tools. Clearly, this is a skill that improves with experience, and with the wealth of approaches accessible to designers experimentation is also strongly encouraged—albeit grounded in a basic understanding of how these tools and processes work, why they are useful, and when they may be appropriate in the context of architectural design.
This early conceptual freehand sketch by Ilona Lénárd of ONL for the F Zuid housing in Amsterdam was quickly developed to form a pattern that was wrapped around the buildings’ façades. Parametric modeling enabled the surface pattern to be optimized around the external envelope.
Innovative connection components made using a 3-D printing rapid-prototyping process by the Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design workshop group led by Jenny Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones at SmartGeometry, Barcelona. The form of the nodes mutates to generate various spatial conditions when connected together with flexible, tubular components.