Can digital design and robot technology be integrated with an ecological design approach? The robotic earthcrafts workshop at Istanbul Bilgi University attempts to relate to biological parameters and digital design and fabrication processes. Thus, the summer school will include seminars and practices on computational design, robotic fabrication, rammed-earth construction techniques, and permaculture design principles to discuss and experience the relationships between technology and ecology. So, the results will be the proposals for micro-permaculture systems, constructed from rammed-earth blocks, with plantings….

This is the basketball cup that won the design contest organized in 2018 by the Turkish Basketball Federation (TBF). Nadide Ebru Yazar and Mete Yazar proposed this idea, and I modeled that in Rhino and rendered it with Neon. Among more than 150 designs, the jury chose our design due to its dynamic formal expression. Cage-editing was very efficient in creating this kind of free-form surface. However, the production phase becomes a lot challenging when we realized that metal printing…

The “Common-Action Wall” Project of the POTplus Design Research Group, founded by Fulya Akipek and Tuğrul Yazar from BİLGİ Faculty of Architecture, got an honorable mention in the category of “Completed Projects/Small Projects” in “S.ARCH 2018 Project Award”. For detailed information about the “Common-Action Walls” Project, please click here and here Members of the Jury: Toyo Ito, Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects (Japan)Prof. Will Alsop, aLL Design (UK)Mats Ove Frosterud, TENGBOM (Sweden)Prof. Leon van Shaik, RMIT University (Australia)Viviana Muscettola, Zaha Hadid Architects (UK)Peter Exley, Architecture is Fun (USA)Jan Mattsson,…

While working on an article today, I wanted to share a method I used. What ancient geometry achieved with just a compass and a straightedge is truly amazing. I’m going to show you how you can use a compass to divide a line into any number of equal parts. This video shows the method of constructing equal segments on a line by only using compass operations. Here, you can see that there is a pattern in the number of required…

I realized this method of constructing basis splines from given control points while searching for a way to teach students about basis splines. I couldn’t find an easy and visual method to create clamped basis splines by connecting simple cubic Bézier spans. It is a tough job and requires lots of complex equations. However, I suddenly realized that there is a special way of doing that. So I decided to share this with the people searching for an easy way…

Below is the Python code you can run in Rhino, that draws a cubic Bézier curve (degree 3). As you can see, the Rhino Python code is very slow and inefficient because we calculate every point with lots of computations. Instead, we can use the spline formulae to make this quicker but I wanted to show that the mathematical construction is parallel to the geometric one. This is a nested set of linear interpolations. In fact, the linterp function in…

In this short study, I generated Rumi Improvizations. The rumi motif, prevalent in traditional Turkish decorative arts like tilings, window lattices, and fabrics, features a round shape with a comma-like body. Despite resembling stylized leaves, rumis have zoomorphic origins. Rumi compositions depicted stylized animal figures, including birds, lions, deer, fish, and mythical creatures like dragons and Simurg. They symbolized strength, fertility, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. The oldest rumî-like animal shapes were discovered on rugs found in…

Yes, interesting topics started to reveal themselves, when I dig into the function curves, especially in the parametric representation. The first interesting application is the “derivative”. Nobody in high school told me that the derivative of a function at a given point gives the slope of the graph at that point. Moreover, it is possible to convert the slope value into an angle in degrees, showing the angle of the tangent line to the x-axis at that point. They are…

This RhinoPython script handles the simple graphs of two-dimensional parametric functions. Therefore, it approximates these functions by drawing parametric curves. It generates many points by solving the functions. The graph of parametric functions is a major topic in most Design Mathematics courses. Because it looks like the building block of many concepts of CAD. However, there is much more to learn before saying that the third degree NURBS is a degree-3 polynomial function. I am curious about learning the underlying…

Jumping into the world of mathematics as a designer seemed to be frightening at the beginning but I opened a new elective course at Bilgi, Design Mathematics. Starting today, I’ll try to log my experiences with the students while we are trying to understand mathematics. The ultimate objective is to find paths that may lead to answering the following question; “what is the relationship between design and math”? Next week, we’ll start with some of the warm-ups and preparatory topics…