Project Description

Since the industrial revolution, handcraft and technology have created divergent paths for making. New forms of software and hardware have rapidly become accessible and attractive to the design profession for a few key reasons: efficiency, speed, and accuracy. This thesis offers a hybrid methodology – a dialectic set of exercises occupying the spaces between software, hardware, and analogue craft in order to understand the relationship between materials and techniques involved in the process of making, without retreating into a romantic nostalgia of “hand craft”.

The thesis will question the design process to critically understand how new technologies are shaping the way in which we build our world. Is it appropriate, or even possible, to design using only software for a profession that ultimately deals with the physical world? How can hybrid processes bridge and entwine hand craft and digital technology? To examine these questions, this thesis will first propose a process of thinking by making. By engaging in this process, this thesis proposes that
its final product be a chair, which aims to embody comprehensive thought in materiality, technique, technology, and craft in a design that engages the human body.