It’s where a lot of our energy has been going in the past years. What we try there, in a very pragmatic way, is to empower students to learn from physical constructive experiments and transpose that into computer programming. This brings them into the control of a robot that builds what they conceived. Even though those projects remain at an experimental scale, we provide students with the fundamental experience that they can be in explicit control over a material fabrication process, and that they can integrate such constructive processes in their design concept. HK / And have you had any feedback from graduates, I’m just wondering whether they have experienced any dichotomy or antagonism towards the digital in practice versus analogue or industry? MK / I can tell from discussions with students that they appreciate the span of the experiences they encounter in our course. It’s probably a bit too early to come to conclusions. Our goal is that the experience of being in control of digitally driven processes results in a proactive attitude. We hope to see the effects in 10–20 years, once these graduates establish their own practices. HK / What are your thoughts on the issue of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights); because this is a new and interesting territory, and are people trying to over-protect the required knowledge? MK / To be honest we haven’t been thinking about IPR too much because our main focus has been on advancing the design research.
I am not too worried if other projects seem familiar to some of the works we have been doing. To some degree, in architecture, it seems normal and necessary; that original work is being referenced and improved, even at the risk that it is sometimes just copied badly. What I don’t like is when concepts get lost by those that take it up; and key discussions about the projects and their development is not being taken on. HK / My concern is that the combination of a lack of creativity and richness in architecture, with the attempt to overprotect it, is killing some of the potential in digital fabrication. Your work, when I first came across it, was a rare moment where the opposite was promoted; by showing people your work whenever I can, I say these people were doing this five or six years ago, why can’t we all be more creative and imaginative about this and stop over-protecting stuff. MK / I agree, thoughts need to be shared in order to become culturally relevant. It is not fruitful to the evolution of the field to overprotect ideas as an academic or practitioner. In our own research we are less involved in commercialising ideas than in bringing developments to a point where they can be taken further by colleagues or eventually by industries. HK / Some observers are saying that one of the wonderful things about this kind of technology is, as you described it, to distribute it and use it at a low-tech level. Do you think there is a chance that your kind of work will reach further into the new orders in the developing parts of the world, where we have abundant low-craft skills
actually feeding off scarce high-end digital technologies? MK / I am interested in a low-tech and ‘do-it-yourself’ approach, but it’s not really what we’re focusing our research on. There are others who are conducting exciting and relevant research in this area. Our focus is on simple and effective technologies that affect the contemporary reality of architectural design and construction. We try to avoid being nostalgic about technology. One effective way, which is neither lowtech or high-tech, is working with generic technologies, such as industrial robots or computers. They can be easily customised to a variety of processes and are inexpensive. HK / What is next for you then? Have you some thoughts you want to share with us about what might happen next? Making everything quicker and cheaper? Good, quick and fast, that’s what they want isn’t it? Which is essentially what a robot does, doesn’t it? MK / Yes, of course, we have a couple of venues that we are pursuing. But first I would like to comment on the ‘good, quick and fast’ attitude. It seems like a very capitalist, performance-oriented perspective on architecture. There is a risk that the whole digital fabrication topic becomes overheated in the next couple of years, similar to digital design in the 1990s, where you had all kinds of wild forms generated on the computer, rendered seductively, yet few understood how to control them and hardly anyone understood how to build them. Now, to some extent, there is a similar lack of a thorough understanding within digital fabrication.