The CDR Design Technology Initiative provides a comprehensive overview of emerging technologies, their consequences, and potential to inform new opportunities and solve critical challenges in design practice. Areas of focus include Computational Design; Building Information Modeling; Reality Computing; Design Robotics; Digital Fabrication; Additive Manufacturing; Construction Automation; Material Systems; and Interactive Environments. 

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Computer Aided Design, Engineering, and Manufacturing (CAD, CAE, CAM) tools have become deeply integrated into many aspects art and design practice. Some of these tools have evolved to provide increased design flexibility allowing for the conception and representation of complex geometries that require increasingly differentiated infrastructural systems to produce. Within this context, the CDR leverages state-of-the art resources to address strategic research and technology development that move toward the realization of applied construction systems through novel material processes. 

 

Design Robotics combines analytic research with open-ended discovery and iterative feedback from material experimentation through the use of automated fabrication tools. Here, the robot is used to support the development of new processes or prototyping larger industrial process. This reserach is made possible by the large format Design Robotics Studio located at the CAUS Reserach and Demonstration Facility, integrated Design Robotics facilities within the School of Architecture + Design, and collabroation with a number of campus laboratories including the Design, Research, and Education for Additive Manufacturing Systems (DREAMS) Laboratory. 

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For more information please contact Dr. Nathan King.

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Related projects: