The Tectonic Reef, an installation built on the beach during the St Kilda Festival 2011 was the result of the first initiative of the Ex-Lab, the Digital Design + Fabrication Intensive Summer Workshop 17 Jan – 11 Feb, 2011, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne. The intensive 4 week workshop introduced students to advanced digital modelling and parametric design software with a focus on producing physical objects through different digital fabrication methods.

For more, see:

exlab.org/

The video is a draft edit by Mike Wilkins, who also did the filming.

As a side product of the learning materials produced for the two Exlab workshops to that point, the learning materials were initially appropriated for use in a third year design studio at the University of Melbourne. Studio AIR introduced computational creativity, algorithmic sketching and parametric modelling for a public art piece, a gateway design for the city of Wyndham on the outskirts of greater Melbourne. The learning materials were then expanded to a video tutorial series available open source online on Vimeo.

To date the video series have been accessed from all over the globe and for over 100,000 views.

The BODYSPACE Project was the central focus of the Virtual Environments course, a first-year constituent of the Bachelor of Environments degree at the University of Melbourne. The course focuses on design representations and teaches a broad range of skills essential in a number of professional occupations and creative practices. Such skills cannot be acquired in a theoretical course and Virtual Environments is structured around a practical project. This project necessitates learning about design precedents, understanding theoretical concepts and utilizing skills in practice.

The project is called BODYSPACE as the design brief requires a wearable lantern informed or inspired by a natural process. It invites students to take ideas from within their heads and apply them directly on the body. Students do this by building a complex form that is made from paper and illuminated by small LED lights.

The body was chosen as the site because it gives students an opportunity to design in reference to their own personae and produce visually interesting outcomes that can be manufactured and tested in context.

To design their lanterns, students analyzed functional affordances of fashion garments and responded to this analysis with innovative solutions inspired by natural and/or constructed environments.

Across three semesters I was involved with the course I led 6 studios and conducted weekly technical sessions available to the entire year level, guiding students in their approach to representing design ideas, modelling geometry and the translation to fabrication information suitable for production via CNC equipment in the Fabrication Lab.

Student work shown: Rebecca Huynh, Gwuihyun Shin, Natasha Santoso, Siavash Malek

Studio Air - a Bachelor of Environments 3rd-year studio at the University of Melbourne - focuses on digital architectural design as one of the most vibrant and influential areas in contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Computational capabilities introduce associative and performance-based processes that were not available in the pre-digital era. As a result, these new methods change conventional relationships between such fundamental categories as ideation and making or form and material.

The implications of these new technologies and new attitudes towards architectural design are far from clear. As always, new approaches generate new problems along with new benefits. However, the influence of digital technology on architectural creativity, professional practices or
construction is immense and growing. In these conditions, students have to engage with computation or risk to receive education that is conceptually and practically obsolete.

Image credits: Rosie Gunzburg

In 2011 Hugh Whitehead of International architecture firm Fosters and Partners led  the 'Designing the Dynamic' workshop and symposium at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.  I participated as a member of the Material Behavior cluster, supervised by Daniel Davis, Sascha Bohnenberger and Chin Koi Khoo, Over the limited timeframe of four days we explored methods of enhancing the performance of boat sails through material applications. I developed process of digital structural simulations, fabrication and sensor analysis in a design feedback loop. Composite materials were composed of various textiles in patterns to control bending stiffness, stretch ability or torsion. Materials such as Mylar© and structural yarns were combined and tested with self made sensors linked via Arduino to parametric models in flexible design software.

The results of the symposium where published (available here: http://www.melbournebooks.com.au/designing-the-dynamic.html) with the image of the standard sail and sensors from our cluster featuring on the front page and an iteration of my performative pattern (shown in the image by Marc Morel at the top of the page) featuring on the back cover.

A design studio run by Gretchen Wilkins at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. My involvement was to initially instruct and then consult design groups on the use of parametric modelling and documentation tools to repurpose harvested waste materials for new structural and design systems.

The most interesting project for me was an kinematic form finding process of a series of arches from brake-press formed steel panels.