Design-Through-Production Formulations

Abstract

Ever since the topic of design and digital fabrication in architecture surfaced ten or so years ago (encouraged by organizations of ACADIA, ECAADE, SIGraDi, and CAADRIA), it has thrived as a productive strategy for advancing the discipline. Clearly, new maps have been charted in architectural discourse that will steer us toward a promising future. Beyond just developing skills to serve new methods of design-through-production, we must now question what ends this methodology serves. This writing is an attempt to chart three potential trajectories inherent in a design-through-production methodology 1) outlining an ethic of production at regional levels in light of the ocean of global information access, 2) investigating the formulation of form inherent in digital design methods, and 3) finding humanist aims through a technological lens. Finally, several pedagocical cases are offered as incremental examples to a collective body of work which applies the design-through-production methodology.