Phygital Material
Phygital Material
A Space for Experimentation in Material and Technology
What is material? What forces act upon it and shape it?
What human experience is generated through materials?
Throughout history, and still today, materials reflect humanity's relationship with the resources surrounding it.
In recent years, traditional materials and their fabrication tools have been joined by digital systems and advanced computetional abilities. These allow us to re-examine the boundaries of materials: what new properties are revealed within them, how new materials move and behaves, what they responds to, what resources they are created from, and what new contexts they generates?
The course will function as an experimental lab with two interconnected workflows that feed into one another; from the physical working table to the digital space and back.
The starting point is designing directly with the material, using classic design methodologies and fabrication technologies. Through an exploratory approach, we will dive into individual learning of new techniques, create a variety of material experiments, and learn to identify design opportunities emerging from the material itself. We will develop intimacy with the creative process in material, craft a personal language and a critical stance, sharpen our attention to detail, and design objects.
Alongside physical experimentation centered around action, reaction,failure, and evolution into a desirable object, we will experiment with generative tools. These will allow us to expand our workflows toward additional capabilities and point of view: altering scale, deconstructing motion, accelerating or slowing down processes, disrupting physical laws, and asking what happens to a material when it momentarily steps outside the physical world acting upon it.
The course will include a warm-up exercise and a main project. Throughout the semester, short exercises will be integrated to examine how material qualities and insights can be articulated as gestures within digital mediums.