Month: September 2016

I think that when you look at where to apply today’s digital fabrication capabilities, it breaks down essentially into two camps: the desire for complexity and/or for precision. In a way, these two are really intertwined but for today it’s interesting to address them as separate requests.

Looking at complexity, this would be the pursuit of perhaps stylistic or artistic results that may have to fall on a machine to execute for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the project requires a level of skill that’s either impossible to find or virtually impossible to fund. A good example is of a bias relief treatment for decorative panels. A machine would be much more adept at holding a continuous level of faithfulness to the design across much more vast areas than could be expected or maybe even found with conventional human craftsmen. Not that I’m knocking human craftsmen – as it’s their skill over the millennia that’s opened the door for us to even consider the sorts of projects.

The other side of digital fabrication in my opinion would be the pursuit of a sort of umbrella of precision. For this, it’s best to picture the sort of fine joinery that human craftsmen of the highest quality have produced over the centuries. What makes all this work, whether of the Eastern schools or Western, is an extreme attention to detail. That very same detail is extraordinarily difficult to perform on today’s job sites. The modern builder is hamstrung by power tools designed for speed rather than craftsmanship and these builders have to work under increasingly tight budgets and tight deadlines. This old-world craftsmanship at an architectural level is left for only the very well off to afford and even they may just not prefer to outlay the time or the costs for such work.

This is perhaps one of the best applications of digital fabrication – the application of a machine’s inherent precision coupled with a tireless speed that can make structural joinery a reality. Both of these factors also serve to push down the cost of increasing the build quality in architecture at the same time.

Both of these features of today’s digital fabrication capabilities, complexity and precision have been executed at one time or another but there’s certainly a great amount of applications that are primed for even greater penetration of the market. Coupling both of these features with a designer’s or architect’s increasing reliance on the use of CAD and BIM, the notion of applying machine’s inherent strengths into both worlds seems all but inevitable

As company who aims to do such things, it becomes important to elucidate on what this term means to us.this is necessary as, at its peak of hype, a lot of things fell under the term’s umbrella. Many were rather fanciful techniques that will invariably be truly realized in the next few decades but may not be viable near term. Currently, the working examples of what most call digital fabrication fall under such things as 3D printing, CNC machining and various robotic arm functions of assembling or more complex subtractive operations. 

In my mind, the definition of digital fabrication is a bit more far reaching while at the same time a bit more narrow. I think the best way to describe it is any function that creates in the real world directly from the digital files they were rendered in. For instance, someone would design a structure in Grasshopper or Revit and then outputs the components to separate files. A digital fabricator would take those files and change them into a machine code that would be then directly cut by machine. These cut components would then be assembled into the real-world space (we feel that ‘fabrication’ ends before ‘assembly’).

This is in contrast to today’s process where architects and designers create structures or designs in the digital space, only to have to print out drawings for human hands to puzzle out the forms with arguably arcane tools of ‘modern’ construction.

While the current process has worked rather well so far, increasingly we are seeing the limitations of the process in various ways. Perhaps that limitation manifests itself in the high costs of retaining enough highly trained or specialized labor to build the more detailed designs. It may be the limitations that hand and power tools can reasonably achieve in rendering complexity or precision. It could even be the entire economics of the current system that, because of the former limits, cost of innovation or the guarantee of quality, limits the design potential for affordability.

Design software has come amazingly far in the last several decades and is now capable of doing incredible things. Structurally, we can now have better control over the loads and the forces. Stylistically we can create far more delicate and beautiful things than a person could even conceive not more than 50 years ago. Sadly, the methods we have to take these from computer files to reality has not kept up in a reasonable way. It’s also unfair to force our construction workforce to recreate the fanciful or precise objects that this advanced software can come up with using the current level of sophistication their tools have. It’s also just as foolhardy to simply wait for the science fiction of drones and robots to catch up with our software.
So Kassen aims to be that company which can more easily connect the design vision with the assemblers on-site. By being the next step that can directly cut and machine the advanced shapes into components that workers can then assemble on-site. We would do this under the masthead of ‘digital fabrication’.