Procedures for Community Based Parametric Design and Making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expanding interest in parametric models of design in both academic and professional circles has led to an explosion of innovation in production methods geared towards engaging these emerging ways of conceiving projects. Simultaneously there has been an equal intensification in the development of tools to facilitate the growth of an on-demand maker culture. From low cost 3D printers and laser cutters to large scale versions of the same, there is a growing technological infrastructure to support the “seamless” flow of information from its digital to form to a material one. What is in many cases lacking are methods to engage non-experts interested in participating in this milieu. How does one without experience in best practices for digital production, begin to engage in this design process or at least begin to be exposed to its potentials? This paper documents three projects explicitly designed to engage this question in the form of community based design build projects. Each of these projects follows the methodology of a component based system in which individual components are informed by localized conditions to produce an emerging formal response. Projects that engage in this method of component based articulation and assembly are too numerous to mention, but the approach has been engaged with semi-expert student teams in our Faculty by visiting designers Andrew Kudless, Marc Fornes, Alvin Huang and others (Fig 1.1) to produce a series of highly articulated installations. Engaging non-expert members of the broader community in these projects was severely limited by their lack of expertise in the digital tools used to design and produce these projects. Figure 1.1 Expert Workshop Fabrications from workshops lead by Marc Fornes, Andrew Kudless and Alvin Huang. In order to engage a broader group of makers, design consumers and community groups we designed three projects that would engage the public at a number of levels in the production of parametrically generated build projects. Figure 1.2 Paraseating bench for pop-up park in Calgary, Canada Paraseating ( Fig. 1.2) is a project in which we designed a single assembly of components that could be aggregated by a group of people to assemble benches for a park that take on a range of ergonomic positions. Figure 1.3 Cellular Phone Booth Cellular Phone Booth (Fig. 1.3) was a project in which the basic assembly and folding methods for the materials it is made of where embedded into a parametric model and manipulated by users through the selection of images that reconfigured its size, shape and density. The paper includes descriptions of the levels of control exercised by both the expert designer and novice design-makers, discusses the issues around the topic of community engagement and education through design and presents a series of case studies that evaluate the efficacy of these techniques for wider spread use by designers interested in engaging the public in parametric design and making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".