Digital-Material Objecthood

The digital revolution brought on by information technology is rapidly transforming our world. We live in an era of accelerated change, in which data speeds invisibly around the globe and the flow of information has superseded physical exchange, whilst computer-generated images, indexes and infrastructures have inscribed themselves within our recognizable aesthetic and material patterns. In fact, the digital is reaching omnipresence, and at breathtaking speed. This is especially true for the creative disciplines, which are constantly being redefined and translated into new synthetic constellations, blurring not only the lines between data and material, between design and making, but also renewing attention to the object – which is being adjusted to an increasingly supple and volatile world and whose identities, relations and boundaries can be now measured, expanded and instrumentalized by the digital. In this regard, the notion of the object is radically recasting itself, evolving as an interface of reflection and experimentation, and ultimately being transferred into hybrid configurations between the real and the virtual world. This, in turn, produces ideas of variation and heterogeneity – and organizes the object as a medium of absorption, recombination and admixture – or, as Bernhard Cache has put it in one of his essays: the object in the digital age is no longer thought of as essential form or distinct ontology, but rather emerges as “objectile”, being generated through a continuous flow of variation.
Against this shifting background, the project “Digital-Material Objecthood: Experiments in Expanded Design Teaching and Thinking” explored new aesthetic, material and epistemic dimensions of the object, while at the same time fostering novel didactic possibilities through the use of emerging digital design and fabrication technology. As a collaboration between the Professorship of Design Theory and Research and the Professorship of Emerging Technologies and Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the project was structured around two semesters, each of which consisted of an integrated set of complementary design studios, skills courses and theory seminars. Through this “trialectic configuration”, the project brought forward all stages and scales of exploring the new notions of the object, from conceptualization, realization, and contextualization, and from micro interventions, to one-to-one and participative workshops and exhibitions (e.g. during the centennial of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition). Here, topics such as Design Computation, Digital Capture, Augmented Reality, Computed Simulation, Digitized Materiality, Machinic Fabrication, and related theoretical discourses such as Actor-Network Theory, Soft Machines or Epistemic Things were intertwined with ephemerality, instantaneity or simultaneity, thereby reviving the so-called “Weimarer Modell” (where all disciplines and discourses are amalgamated through a project-based learning approach) and, beyond that, provoking new appreciations of ideas like design interaction, digital craft, new materialism, and multiplex ecologies.
The present publication showcases a collection of results and formats that were developed throughout the project. It reflects the project’s two-semester ‘trialectic’ structure of design, skill and theory modules. The first part, “Fabricating and Thinking through Vibrant Materiality” (page 16), documents the first semester, which was conceived of as an embedded three-sided conversation between the designerly exploration of irregular timber geometries within speculative historical contexts with CNC fabrication skills and theoretical explorations of notions such as material vibrancy, computational design thinking, epistemic prototyping and experimental systems. The second part, “Augmentation, Virtualities, Materialisations” (page 46), documents a semester interweaving theories of cyborgism, virtuality, continuity, simulacra and assemblages with in-depth technological and designerly explorations of augmented reality-enabled and -centred fabrication.
Within these courses, students were challenged to “design” new digital-material objecthoods through an array of new interactive tools and computational techniques (such as 3D scanning, parametric modelling and simulation, augmented-reality-enabled and CNC fabrication), while, at the same time, paying attention to their aesthetic, material and performative agency, and epistemic capacity. This began, for example, with deep discussions of key theories, histories and methods of the digital, augmenting them with specific design approaches and techniques, transferring them to specific (local) contexts and configurations, and, ultimately, creating a vast array of drawings, models, interventions, workflows and prototypes. In such a multi-dimensional shaping – and even cybernetic – process, students radically expanded their understanding of the object. In this expanded understanding, the pervasive presence of digital media and information technology is inseparable from the importance given to the physis of the object – real or virtual, deterministic or chaotic, scheduled or simply affective. As such, the epistemic dimension played a particular role since parametric design and digital fabrication of objects corresponds to something that happens and evolves, rather than something that is following predefined criteria or categories. Consequently, this procedural nature fosters a constructive, temporal, and fluid approach toward the notion of the object. Here, data, actors, machines, networks and occurrences are seamlessly connected and entangled, and dynamically express and allow new epistemic insight.
Overall, the project created a setting, in which students’ thorough research, experiments and field work – alongside meetings with officials, stakeholders, and experts – are immersed into real-world project settings where they can take into account the comprehensive, explorative and integrative nature of design. The diversity in approaches, ranging from programme, form, media, materials, structures, typologies and contexts, were testament to this open and diverse learning setting, allowing individual ambitions and design sensibilities. At the same time, the project inherited the ideal of research-based teaching. This meant that constructivist exploration and knowledge production were at the heart of the project, and that themes, tasks, and tools were not presented as closed, but rather open to be further explored (and extrapolated). In this setting, students autonomously identified essential problems and solutions, applied corresponding scientific concepts and methods, and, most importantly, they were able to interlink theoretical and practical knowledge and to enhance their cross-disciplinary competences.
Although the project successfully addressed new possibilities to reshape our understanding of the object and its meaning for novel learning approaches, there are, of course, further steps to be taken. For example, in a more and more complex world of digital production, we tend to lose the sense of awareness and performative perspectives, as if the singular and subjective do not matter anymore and the only future to be expected is the intensification of functional and technocratic capacity. These dangers – and their material internalizations and externalizations – are present in many concurrent approaches and digitally-produced objects, including the fulfillment of constraints and conditions dictated by “computationalism” without ever questioning inherent limitations or contexts. Therefore, one of the most pressing challenges awaiting projects such as “Digital-Material Objecthood” perhaps has to do with the need to think (and act) in speculative, epistemic and performative terms again – and to expand, or even to reinvent sense and subjectivity, experience and materiality, narration and meaning, and with that the forsaken ideal of the object.
Thus, it is with no little pride that the project team successfully puts forth first steps and potential avenues in this direction – and, hopefully, there will be more examples and explorations in the near future. At the same time, most of the content presented in this documentation was produced by the students. Hence, the project team is deeply grateful for their pioneering efforts and contributions, as well as for their outstanding creativity and extraordinary energy. The project team is also extremely thankful to the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (StIL), and to the Lernraum.Bauhaus-Team (in particular to Dr. Andreas Mai, Dr. Anne Brannys, Sophie Foster, Anja Gehrcken, Jan Sieber and Andreas Wolter) for giving the opportunity of realizing such a didactical endeavour and for their generous support throughout the project. Much of the project would have not been possible without the valuable support of the University’s workshops, particularly Matthias Henkelmann, Andreas Riese, Thomas Patze, Jens Hölland and Patrick Joppien. Finally, we would like to thank our supporting teaching staff, critics and contributors (Paula Strunden, Viviana Defazio, Sofia Fernández, William Victor Camilleri, Prof. Dr. Alex Schweder, Lea Wittich, Lukas Kirschnick), ThüringenForst (Wolfgang Grade), Pollmeier Creuzburg and Thomas Apel, as well as our student assistants Carlina Rethwilm, Mira Müller, Leonard Schulz and Ezra Spitzbarth.