Today, I am introducing a student work from the Design Mathematics course. Foad Sarsangi is a very talented designer, who attended my elective course last semester. The final project he studied was inspired by Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus chapel. Foad wanted to experience its special production process. However, as the course was about “mathematics”, he also studied, solved, and generated an interior volume to be subtracted from a solid mass. […]
This is a student project of the Computation-based Basic Design Lanterns finals of the year 2019. This year was exceptionally successful in creating 3d components and constructing relationships as a systematic whole. Again, the students started with small-scale experiments on folding and attaching cards. This is a study of how planar elements can generate volumetric units. They also studied Archimedean solids to understand geometric performances of particular shapes. We encouraged […]
This is a robotic fabrication student project developed in the Digital Fabrication elective course in 2018. This group of students experimented with the hot wire cutting of EPS foam. Their aim was to create curved surfaces by using a straight wire. Design research started with a literature study of precedents. Then, after several cutting experiments with the available hotwire cutter tool, they gained better control over the technology. However, they […]
I will try to explain the student project called KUKABAE that was developed in my Robotic Fabrication elective course in 2018. This was a very interesting project. Initially, the students were doing the design to attach an ordinary pen holder to the robot. but then the project changed by chance. they decided to replace a pen holder with a ceramic knife. As seen in the video and pictures, the relationship […]
Here is a design exercise I’ve been giving to students. It aims to familiarize students with the concept of dataflow diagrams used in Grasshopper. Dataflow is a different concept than conventional computer programming. Here is a good comparison between control flow and dataflow languages. In most educational settings (such as courses and workshops) we concentrate on the fundamental issue of dataflow management via design projects. This requires us to think […]
This is my publication in Megaron, Yıldız Technical University Faculty of Architecture Journal. It is titled: “The relationship between Gaussian curvature and surface paneling approaches in architecture”. You can read the abstract of the paper below: As the design of free-form architectural surfaces becomes easier, questioning and foreseeing the feasibility of the construction of these surfaces becomes important. Such an inquiry requires sufficient knowledge of architectural geometry besides the knowledge […]
Today, we have studied creating complex robot programs manually again. Platonic solids were the subject of this study. Students tried to create a sequence of robot moves that produces a Platonic solid out of a 17cm EPS cube. We simply call this the robotic hotwire cutting polyhedra exercise. However, the size of our hotwire cutter became one of the problems because of its risk of crashing. We crashed several times […]
This project is developed in the summer workshop titled Robotic Earthcrafts conducted at İstanbul Bilgi University Architectural Design graduate program. Students call this project “ZOM”. Students are Murat Sökün, Zeynep Çakmak, and Özlem Güven. We organized the workshop together with Fulya Akipek and Hülya Oral. You can find more details about the workshop here. In this project, a simple robot code created the EPS molds of the rammed-earth module. Below […]
Today, we tried to understand one of the ways of generating multiple planes in Grasshopper. This is an important step in utilizing the robot program efficiently. Instead of manually jogging the robot, we designed the path that the robot will dig lots of chopsticks. In the “Robotic Chopstick Digger Exercise”, every student designed their own paths and decided the height, orientation, and number of sticks to be dug on an […]
In the Digital Fabrication course, I needed to explain the plane orientation and rotation angles. This is why I prepared this Spatial Recognition Test. This is an important topic regarding the matching of the TCP (tool center point) plane of the robot and the plane(s) designers generate. In Rhino, we define a construction plane by red (X), green (Y), and blue (Z) colors. The relative positions among those axes are […]
This paper covers ongoing research titled “Growing an Architectural System”. It is an interdisciplinary work relating permaculture studies with computational design and production technologies. It includes testing some issues of performance via full-scale prototypes. Growing Pots is the first study we will mention in the paper. It is about the design of a micro-permaculture system and 3d printed products realized by students of an elective course. On the other hand, […]
Today in the Digital Fabrication course, we examined digital-physical translations utilizing the robots add-on for Grasshopper. Students learn how to get coordinate data from a physical environment, use it in the digital model and apply it to a robot motion. We aimed to dig chopsticks into an EPS block by using a special wooden tool called “Chopstick Digger”. In the first hour of the class, we attached the “pointer” tool, […]
In the Digital Fabrication course, we are in the middle of a sea, full of technical details, and students need motivation. This is why I felt I should do something simple and educational but funny at the same time; a “kissing the cube” exercise. The planned exercise was about programming the robot to touch every facet of a cube without colliding with it. Of course, we couldn’t manage to kiss […]
One of the new assignments of our Computation-based Basic Design studio is called “Self-Organizing Patterns”. Although I’m not very sure about their self-organization potential, there are several good examples of systematic pattern-making. In the third week of their design education, some of the students proved themselves very well in analyzing and re-configuring natural structures in 2D abstract compositions. Selina Şişik Kardelen Kurt Sude Aydın
Today, we started learning Robots add-on for Grasshopper. The first two codes we experimented with were similar to the first week’s jogging exercises. In the first one called “axial jogging”, we had 6 number sliders to control the angles of the axes. Every number slider generates values between -Pi and +Pi. These numbers are joined into a text by adding a comma in between. Then, Create program and Simulate Program […]
On the second day of the Digital Fabrication course, we tried to understand what is a “tool” and how to draw/ produce/ attach/calibrate a simple penholder tool for our robot. This study will hopefully make students aware of the effects of these procedures in robotic design and fabrication. The tool we used here is based on this Rhino drawing laser-cut from a waste plexiglass sheet. The flange of our robot has a diameter […]
This is a competition entry on the innovative uses of natural stone. Urban Polyhedra aims to organize the natural stone usage, especially on the shores. In the current implementation of this system, random blocks are placed to prevent landslides on the urban coastal areas, but restrict the interaction of the citizens with the shore, and destroy the spaces for sea creatures, and vegetation. Thus, this random placement makes it difficult […]