Design-research by making: An educational hands-on approach to design-research through manual/ robotic processes Ioanna Symeonidou & Renate WeissenbĂśck Institute of Architecture and Media, Graz University of Technology, Austria ABSTRACT This paper presents educational experiences, linking analogue and digital design approaches. It suggests physical prototyping as a novel form of design research in an educational context, exploring design opportunities fostered by fabrication processes. The authors describe insights gained while leading two courses at Graz University of Technology, focussing on tactile experiments of forming materials, by hand or robots, guided by the material behaviour and reaction. Furthermore, this paper wishes to point out the advantage of research-based education, aiming for an understanding of design thinking that goes beyond curriculum and current technologies, fostering an open-ended development process.
INTRODUCTION The unprecedented technological advances and paradigm shifts in design processes have had a strong impact in architectural practice, with a direct repercussion in education. With the rapid speed of new developments, there is an extensive discourse about the future of architectural education, with opinions converging to the belief that design education should be researchbased, to keep up with current topics and technologies (Buchanan, 2001; Matthews and Buur, 2009; Simonsen et al., 2012). In the cases described in this paper, the authors combine design-research undertaken as part of their respective PhD dissertations with teaching concepts and methodologies developed during their teaching appointments at Graz University of Technology. During the last decade, we have observed a strong tendency of linking the digital world to the physical-material realm. One the one hand, with the development of software that simulates physical behaviour, on the other hand, with the rapid development of digital fabrication techniques and interfaces, i.e. easy programming of industrial robots. In the age of digital fabrication, the role of architects in the design-to-build-process changes significantly, as they are able to extend their digital design competencies into the physical world, thereby gaining control over production and materiality. As Menges describes it “A novel convergence of computation and materialisation is about to emerge, bringing the virtual process of design and the physical realisation of architecture much closer together, more so than ever before� (Menges, 2012).