Digital Design and Craft

Lecturer: Yoav Shterman

We are at the dawn of a digital industrial revolution. Many products such as shoes,
eyeglasses, headsets, medical devices and parts for the aerospace industry are now being digitally manufactured by 3D printers. As the technology progresses, more and more products that are now being mass-produced will be produced by 3D printers and other digital tools. These products will be free from conventional manufacturing constraints, be manufactured on demand and be customized to users needs.

Digital fabrication technologies challenge the traditional role of industrial designers. In contrast to the current situation in which one version of the product is designed and mass produced, digital means will enable parametric designs that represent many versions of a product. Each version will be customized to the user’s body data, environmental conditions and aesthetic preferences.

The Digital Design and Craft course will introduce students to the concepts of coding and parametric design in Processing and Rhino + Grasshopper environments with hands-on workshops and exercises. We will build an algorithmic tool to explore a design space and use 3D printers or other digital fabrication tools to produce a physical version of a design. In addition, we will review current digital fabrication technologies and recent computation design and computational fabrication projects from the academia and the industry.