SEEING IS DOING: SYNTHETIC TOOLS FOR ROBOTICALLY AUGMENTED FABRICATION IN HIGH-SKILL DOMAINS

This paper outlines the development of an open-source, robotic toolkit that enables the integration of real-time sensing for design and fabrication in high-skill domains. This constellation of tools serves to augment standard CAD/CAM workflows where tool path creation and tool path execution are divided into two distinct operations. This sequential split between the virtual design, control and visualization of geometry for fabrication-seeing-and the computerized control of machines interacting with physical material-doing-detaches bodily skill from standard building techniques and furthers the tendency for digital technologies to curtail haptic feedback in the architectural design process. Despite an early inheritance from industrial manufacturing in architectural robotics (dictated by the rubrics of efficiency and safety), promising paradigms for human-machine collaboration in high-skill domains are rapidly emerging in many fields, and are poised to question the separation of seeing and doing ingrained in commonly held ideas of architectural design process and authorship.