Digital Materialization

Advances in digital design and fabrication technologies are leading toward single fabrication systems capable of producing almost any complete functional object. We are proposing a new paradigm for manufacturing, which we call Universal Desktop Fabrication (UDF), and a framework for its development. UDF will be a coherent system of volumetric digital design software able to handle infinite complexity at any spatial resolution and compact, automated, multi-material digital fabrication hardware. This system aims to be inexpensive, simple, safe and intuitive to operate, open to user modification and experimentation, and capable of rapidly manufacturing almost any arbitrary, complete, high-quality, functional object. Through the broad accessibility and generality of digital technology, UDF will enable vastly more individuals to become innovators of technology, and will catalyze a shift from specialized mass production and global transportation of products to personal customization and point-of-use manufacturing. Likewise, the inherent accuracy and speed of digital computation will allow processes that significantly surpass the practical complexity of the current design and manufacturing systems. This transformation of manufacturing will allow for entirely new classes of human-made, peer-produced, micro-engineered objects, resulting in more dynamic and natural interactions with the world. We describe and illustrate our current results in UDF hardware and software, and describe future development directions.

This article details the historical development of the concept of digital materiality, regarding the evolutions of contemporary stakes and technological innovations. The objective is to enrich this concept with a 3rd generation digital material founded on digital continuity from design to architectural materialization. This increment is motivated by the use of RFID tag to store information as digital signals in physical modules. This approach allows for the creation of a digital interface accessible to humans as much as computational tools, grasping a multitude of challenges facing digital discrete design. This method offers a series of decisive advantages both practical and theoretical to the notion of digital material.

Digital and networked media are characterized by a fundamental disconnection between the modes of operating of these media, the human sensorium and knowledge. In order for humans to consciously participate in this expanded domain of sensibility, additional mediation is required to ‘presentify’ what is not accessible to human perception. This situation has motivated the creation of manifold ‘data objects’ in the form of visualizations, soundscapes and sonifications, 3D materializations, and data-driven interactives in the neighboring domains of art, design, science, and humanities scholarship. These new knowledge objects, as we propose to call them, both produce and mediate knowledge in the process of making data experienceable. They turn that what essentially does not correlate to human sensory capacities into something that the human sensorium is capable of engaging with. As such, they can play a crucial role in providing access, and thereby modalities of critical and creative rela...

Digital and networked media are characterized by a fundamental disconnection between the modes of operating of these media, the human sensorium and knowledge. In order for humans to consciously participate in this expanded domain of sensibility, additional mediation is required to 'presentify' what is not accessible to human perception. This situation has motivated the creation of manifold 'data objects' in the form of visualizations, soundscapes and sonifications, 3D materializations, and data-driven interactives in the neighboring domains of art, design, science, and humanities scholarship. These new knowledge objects, as we propose to call them, both produce and mediate knowledge in the process of making data experienceable. They turn that what essentially does not correlate to human sensory capacities into something that the human sensorium is capable of engaging with. As such, they can play a crucial role in providing access, and thereby modalities of critical and creative relating, to what Hansen (2015) describes as the expanded domain of sensibility. Yet, the effects and implications of the sensory specificities of these knowledge objects remain under-acknowledged, as are the potentials of these modes of presentifying data. Here, we explore and compare a diversity of such knowledge objects and look at their different media modalities and different experiential qualities, and how these afford ways of knowing.