Constructing Information: Towards a Feedback Ecology in Digital Design and Fabrication

Abstract

As strategies evolve using digital means to navigate design in architecture, critical process-based approaches are essential to the discourse. The often complex integration of design, analysis, and fabrication through digital technologies is wholly reliant upon a process-basis necessitating the use of a design feedback loop, which reinforces critical decision-making and challenges the notions of how we produce, visualize, and analyze information in the service of production and assembly. Central to this process-based approach is the effective and innovative integration of information and the interrogation of material based explorations in the making of architecture. This fabrication ‘ecology’ forces designers to engage complexity and accept the unpredictability of emergent systems. It also exposes the process of working to critique and refine feedback loops in light of complex tools, methods, materials, site, and performance considerations. In total, strategies for engaging this ‘ecology’ are essential to accentuate our present understanding of environmental design and theory in relation to digital processes for design and fabrication. ¶ This paper recounts a design/fabrication seminar entitled “Constructing Information” in which architecture students examined an environmental design problem by way of the design feedback loop, where their efforts in applying digital design and fabrication methods were driven explicitly by material and site realities and where their work was executed, installed, and critically explored in situ. These projections raise important questions about how information, complexity, and context overlay and merge, and underscore the critical potential of visual, spatial, and material effects as part of a fabrication-oriented design process.