Through the almost seamless ability to output digital designs to physical objects, digital fabrication has transformed the way designers work. At this point, many of the tools and techniques of digital fabrication are well established and almost taken for granted within the design professions. To begin this course we will review these ‘traditional’ digital fabrication techniques in order to establish a baseline skill set to work from. We will then utilize a series of exercises in order to explore a hybrid approaches to digital fabrication in which multiple techniques are utilized within the same work. With the advent of 3D printing technology in the late 1980s and the current wave of widespread adoption as a design tool—found in design schools and offices across the world—the immediate testing of complex digital models has never been quicker, clearer, or more immediate. Despite this formal freedom to test and print, the installations and buildings generated from these complex digital models rely on much more traditional building techniques for their construction. By combining various digital fabrication approaches, we seek to challenge and reframe the often reductive geometries that currently supports much of this work and bring with it a new way of approaching aesthetics, structure, and construction based on the possibilities inherent in these digital techniques.
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