Robotic Prototypes in Architecture

Set at the Cal Design Lab at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, this workshop will explore a new multidisciplinary approach to robotics. Interest in robotics has risen dramatically over the last fifteen years in the fields of architecture, engineering, industrial design, and art. Designers in the future will be called upon to create spaces that are computationally enhanced, interactive, responsive and artificially intelligent. Rather than designing traditional buildings and simply applying a computational layer, this workshop will explore a more integrative and synthetic approach. A review of the literature reveals a lack of established methodologies for designing architectural spaces as intelligent spatial systems. As such, it is clear that a new multidisciplinary approach is needed to bring together research in the fields of interaction design (IxD), architectural design, product design, human computer interaction (HCI), embedded systems, and engineering. Workshop participants will explore a range of emerging software and hardware tools and techniques for designing, programming, visualizing, fabricating and testing parametric robotic architectural prototypes well beyond the traditional domain of architecture or design education. This workshop will be led by Jason Kelly Johnson, a founding design partner of Future Cities Lab in San Francisco. The 2013 Cal Design Lab will include the following workshops: Expressive Movement in Architecture and Design (July 15-19), Frontiers in Desktop Fabrication (July 29-August 2), and Gestural and Natural User Interfaces (August 5-9). Each one-week workshop is designed by an expert in the topic domain that is pushing the boundaries of making, and features a combination of informational lectures, structured hands-on learning activities and self-directed open-ended experimentation. For more info, please visit: http://ced.berkeley.edu/academics/summer-programs/design-futures-workshop-series/.