What is digital fabrication?
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’.
