It is 75°F inside, and 9°F degrees outside. It is late April, yet the ground is still covered with snow. The diner is dark, the solstice sun falling on the leather upholstered double-bench, ready to seat four. The Hotel Royal is empty though faint sounds of dishes being cleaned arise from the back. It is afternoon, but it might as well be morning. The sun’s position in the sky has barely changed—its intensity has neither increased nor diminished. It will stay that way until late evening. Further down the hallway is the elongated bar with its four gambling machines. It is even darker. As the evening descends, locals will start to arrive.
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Informing Grounds: Robotic Sand-forming Simulating Remote Autonomous Lunar Groundscaping
Advancements in robotic fabrication are enabling on-site construction in increasingly larger scales. In this paper, we argue that as autonomous tools encounter the territorial scale, they open new ways to embed information into it.
To define the new practice, this paper introduces a protocol combining a theoretical framework and an iterative process titled Informing Grounds. This protocol mediates and supports the exchange of knowledge between a digital and a physical environment and
is applicable to a variety of materials with uncertain characteristics in a robotic manu- facturing scenario. The process is applied on soil and demonstrated through a recent design-to-fabrication workshop that focused on simulating digital groundscaping of distant lunar grounds employing robotic sand-forming.
The first stage is ‘sampling’—observing the physical domain both as an initial step as well as a step between the forming cycles to update the virtual model. The second stage is ‘streaming’—the generation of information derived from the digital model and its projection onto the physical realm. The third stage is ‘transforming’—the shaping of the sand medium through a physical gesture. The workshop outcomes serve as the basis for discussion regarding the challenges posed by applying autonomous robotic tools on materials with uncertain behavior at a large-scale.
Exercises in Style: A Transdisciplinary Discussion
Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.