Object-Sketch: An Exploration Into the Materiality of Digital Fabrication and 3D-Printed Ceramics

Abstract

Artists and designers constantly negotiate and renegotiate assemblages of entangled relationships and intera-actions in our making practice. This practice-based research explores this negotiation with specific reference to the digital fabrication of 3D printed ceramic objects. In the process it considers the nature of digital materials as simultaneously physical and informational. It draws on theories of materiality of Simone Ferracina (“ecologies of inception”), new materialists like Karen Barad (“intra-action”), and Gilles Deleuze (“assemblage”). It refers particularly to creative work by Neri Oxman and Gramazio Kohler, who suggest a future where a design might be grown, and machine behaviours are not just the framework but the medium with which we explore and expand design potential.

This research asks: how could a sketchy interplay of digital-analog interfaces in fabrication workflows allow us to explore an objects digital materiality?

It involved the production of drawings, physical objects, digital models, and code, understood as a series of “sketches”: conversational and provisional diagrams that acts as a medium for values, roles and functions to emerge as part of a workflow. The project culminates in the design of a sketchy interface, a haptic means to feed data into a ceramic fabrication process.