Digital Fabrications

Description:




Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true
stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of
architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles,
and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces
in the discipline. 

The essays ask, how do we characterise our post-digital design labor? What are
the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world
largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of
the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book 
 accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has
taken command of our cultural products.


From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally
associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an
essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software
packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the
structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary
conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans,
sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD
document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project
visually.


While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to
re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth
another way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, and
oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In