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ArchDaily has posted a rather interesting selection of metal connectors meant for laminated wood products. At one level, the different methods are great to look at for seeing what’s available currently for such things and I’d also posit that they’re also great examples to draw from when looking into designing something a little more custom or further afield.

These 15 examples, for me, beg the question of whether there are ways where these connectors could be made with wood (engineered or otherwise) or even integrated into the laminate components themselves. Obviously this supposes that there would need to be a greater amount of fabrication per component and connector – and certainly a bit of engineering involved.

This thinking sort of dovetails with the previous post looking at how IKEA is working to reduce the overall part count and to an extent, the combination of materials and components. Perhaps the same can be done with architectural-scale projects.

Creating connectors out of wood does pose a few interesting issues, namely it would appear that most of these pictured in the article calls for bolting in two directions 90 degrees off from each other. This is a bit more complex with most wood products where grain tends to be an issue – and is certainly not the case with metals where strength is homogeneous no matter which direction.

On the surface, this table leg solution from IKEA (by way of Core77.com) seems like a pretty interesting bit of design work that reduces manufacturing and supply chain load, as the number of components are reduced (less hardware). I would also assume that they’d figured out how to make the new CNC embellishments with the same machine that would have made the parts to begin with. All wins from a production lens.

The thing that excites me about the story is that, at least in furniture design, the applications of CNC woodworking are moving from shape-cutting into interlocking joinery of a much more complex definition. Thinking like IKEA is moves us past the general “tab-slot” thinking (and even conventional woodworking joinery) and into more of a “machine component” sort of design methodology. It’s fun to think about other applications that will develop in the future when this becomes more common.

It’s no secret that the availability of CNC fabrication opens a lot of doors for the design community, but how will it effect the next style movements?

The high-design world currently lives in a world that’s built on minimalism. No flash, no extraneous detail and the precision of shape. To see where tomorrow’s styling is going it’s important to understand how we got to this world of “Modern” that’s defined as “minimalism”.

Going back to just after the turn of the last century, we record a sea-change in the way the world styled things. If one focuses on only the International Style or Bauhaus that minimal style was created for the idealistic purpose of creating products so that all in society could achieve the same level of comfort. To remove a lot of the detail work was a primary method, in their minds, that would allow for the every-man to have such things we think of as common, like refrigerators, more furniture, tableware and various kitchen items of the so-called modern world.

How much cheaper would a coffee pot be if it wasn’t made by craftsmen that inscribed and forged  them into intricate shapes? They would be cheap enough for anyone to own as they’d be easy to make with a simpler manufacturing process. So too was the thinking behind the tube-framed furniture of LeCorbusier and Eileen Gray. Instead of time consuming labor done by craftsmen, a sofa could be formed with modern tools by certainly less skilled workers. This would drive down the cost of a couch to approach-ability.

While the aim of modern was admirable, their goals sadly did not translate to the real world. Modern became expensive and aimed at the exact group it was not designed for. We now associate clean lines and a desert of detail to “Modern”.

Only relatively recently has the world seen the true manifestation of the original desires for modern design. The companies leveraging these traits are companies like Target and IKEA. The lack of ornamentation works insanely well at reducing costs. This reduction has made living in the modern world relatively easy. But what now happens with design?

There can be no more subtraction, there must now be addition.

New tools like CNC machining has now opened the door for designers to more easily employ ornamentation into custom or low-count production runs. It’s also opened the door for the implementation of styling and design complexity far beyond what craftsmen can do – or more importantly – what we can afford craftsmen to do. Couple this with the notion that at a certain point simplification of designs can only go so far before there is no difference between designers and ornamentation becomes almost a necessary adaptation.

The new ornamentation will once again bring massive personalization but will require processes that can keep up. This will fall to digital fabrication processes where designers can design digitally and send these to firms to contract manufacture the results. Machines like CNC Mills and Lathes will be necessary to achieve the new design and styling intents.
At a certain level, there will be cottage industries of designers with CNC Mills in their shops, but there will also be the need for larger-scale implementations as designers tire of having satisfy the demands of designing and of operating complex machinery. But in the end, ornamentation will be reborn in the high-end design space, even if it’s manufacturers have given up the old ways of manufacturing items.

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’.