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Design for Manufacture explores the potential of established and new production methods within our contemporary context to equip designers with the knowledge to drive impactful change.
Central to Design for Manufacture is a deep fascination with the tangible qualities and inherent values within the act of creation. The programme engages with pressing global challenges that are consistent with students’ independent explorations in materials and techniques of production, sustaining investigative research within the Architectural Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector.
Over the past two and a half centuries, manufacturers have strived to trade resource consumption to maximise profit. Simultaneously, the field of Design for Manufacture has emerged as a novel discipline, formalising an approach that integrates resource and contextual awareness into the design process to create diverse values. It may
appear futile to invest time and effort in devising solutions for a sector where self-interests remain largely unregulated by competition, especially when the act of recognising current circumstances risks the taking on of heavy losses. The outcomes in the AEC sector reveal a shared imagination bound by specific solution-oriented demands, often tailored to requirements with limited relevance to the modern world we inhabit.
Within the current built environment, automated assembly could exacerbate existing issues, essentially by ‘building bad faster’. However, through an approach liberated from convention and guided by first principles, students led by Pradeep Devadass have explored how automated timber assembly could serve as the basis for something exceptional, envisioning designs that leverage surplus waste materials and utilising a digital breadcrumb trail to enable re-use through inventory mining.
Under the guidance of Nikoletta Karastathi, students have explored the intricacies of textile tectonics to enhance and re-imagine fabrication processes. Projects investigated a variety of topics, such as the use of programmable knitted pneumatics, the development of bio-composite materials from invasive plant species and robotic weaving.
This year, four groups engaged in speculation regarding the practice of ‘re-manufacturing’. Working closely with Ben Spong, each group successfully devised innovative methodologies for the adaptation of current building components and materials. These approaches provoked fundamental inquiries into methods of measurement, production and intervention in relation to our material and architectural heritage.
Students tutored by Arthur Prior evolved additive manufacturing methods by developing multi-nozzle printing and exploring its applications, particularly how it can be used to create auxetic patterns for shading façades. Other work explored how triply periodic minimal surfaces can drive 3D-printed forms to create cooling systems. Modularity has been the theme of several projects looking at how assembly processes and the use of materials can be made more efficient by design.