Robotic Arm in Basic Design Studio
This is the new paper in Nexus Network Journal. Together with the project collaborators Gamze Gündüz, Hülya Oral, and Meryem Yabanigül, we explained the results of an educational test on the utilization of a robotic arm in the basic design studio. Here is the abstract of it:
Digital fabrication technologies are revealing new ways of dealing with design processes. Robotic fabrication technologies are generally dismissed at the undergraduate level, especially in first-year design education. This is due to the common belief that novice design students have insufficient skills for designing with a robotic arm. This paper presents an experiment in a first-year basic design studio at a faculty of architecture. The studio investigates the utilization of a robotic arm as a design and production tool. Thus, we encouraged students without robot programming and operation skills to transfer a priori skills of hand tools and techniques learned in successive assignments to utilize the robotic arm. This experiment revealed the potential educational strategies for integrating robot technology in first-year design studios.
It is possible to predict a wider, more in-depth, and two-way integration of robot technology in design education. While a wider integration would increase the number of experiments in real studio settings, a
more in-depth integration would lead us to re-think the cognitive and constructivist roots of conventional design education. This requires a two-way integration that necessitates exchanges based on interdisciplinary studies. Therefore, the robot industry should also react to this convergence by introducing user-friendly and intelligent robots, namely collaborative robots (COBOTS) that are more suitable for educational purposes.
You can find the full paper here.