GUAN LEE AND DANIEL WIDRIG
DIGITAL MANUAL
Introduction
Different projects were developed to represent specific ways of working between hand and digital tools. This research illustrates a shift in design and production methodology, readable across multiple projects at different scales.
Architecture is made at different scales: in situ and prefabricated in factories. Manual work is still a key part of the construction industry, alongside advances in digital manufacturing and automation. This research speculates on a hybrid form of production, which highlights neither digital or manual but a new way of thinking and working in architectural design production. With the advent of computerisation, the difference between digital and manual has often been crudely opposed: self-generating geometries are set against wilful formal constructions; digital code-driven productions against hand-operated tools; painless automation against laborious toil; or, simply, robot against human. Digital Manual challenges this opposition, creating a paradigm in which manual production and digital automation work together to allow for the conservation of crafts while integrating technological advances. It proposes that digital fabrication is improved with the help of manual craftsmanship and engages with sustainable materials to form a new mode of production. Hybridity is compelling because the digital is perceived as the future/emergent, while the manual is the past/obsolescent. Whatever the digital future holds, it is unlikely that the human element of design, particularly in the field of architecture, will completely disappear. One can engage with digital modelling software or make and design by hand, but can we work in between? What kind of questions are relevant if straddling these territories is central to our project? Digital Manual consciously revolves around the hand- and machine-made, viewing design as procedural and systematic yet textural and indexical. Handmade objects leave behind distinctive traces not replicable with machines.
SUP
SUP looks at ways to work with plastic, to make designs that are both multiuse and reconfigurable. A number of modular building components were made using ‘S’, ‘U’ and ‘P’ shapes that can be endlessly reconfigured. These shapes were extracted from the Hilbert Curve’s folded geometry: a fractal curve that can be folded infinitely to fill a volume. SUP’s components can either be joined end to end or interlocked into complex blocks. It has the potential to be used as an educational toy with endless permutations, akin to Lego, with the user naturally trying to see what fits. While digital processes were used to design the system, it can also be approached manually without any specialist knowledge.
3 ‘Chair design two’, assembled using largescale recycled nylon SUP components.
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