Nathan King

Integrated Environmental Design and Robotic Fabrication Workflow for Ceramic Shading Systems

The current design practice for high performance, custom facade systems disconnects the initial facade design from the fabrication phase. The early design phases typically involve a series of iterative tests during which the environmental performance of different design variants is verified through simulations or physical measurements. After completing the environmental design, construction and fabrication constraints are incorporated. Time, budget constraints, and workflow incompatibilities are common obstacles that prevent design teams from verifying, through environmental analysis, that the final design still ‘works’. This paper presents an integrated environmental design and digital fabrication workflow for a custom ceramic shading system. Using the CAD environment Rhinoceros as a shared platform the process allows the design team to rapidly migrate between the environmental and the fabrication models. The recently developed DIVA plug-in for Rhinoceros allows for a seamless performance assessment of the facade in terms of daylight. Glare and annual energy use are addressed through connections to Radiance, Daysim and EnergyPlus simulations. A custom Grasshopper component and additional Rhino scripts were developed to link the environmentally optimized CAD file via Rapid code to a novel ceramic production process based on a 6-axis industrial robot. The resulting environmental design-tomanufacturing process was tested during the generation of a prototypical high performance ceramic shading system.

Phase Change: Approaching Research Methodologies Through Design Robotics

This chapter positions ongoing research surrounding robotic manipulation of materials during phase-change and curing conducted by the University or Innsbruck Institute for Experimental Architecture’s REX|LAB within the context of Design Robotics, a research paradigm established by the Design Robotics Group at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The goal of this analysis is the identification of key research principles and evaluation criteria that can inform future developments toward the low-volume production of polymer-based architectural building components. An overview of industrial plastic-forming techniques is used to identify limitations and opportunities within the associated material systems and the findings used to contextualize examples from ongoing research. A series of strategic next steps are proposed and will be explored during a series of workshop experiments.