Visualizing the Operative and Managing Complexity: Communicating the Design-fabrication Feedback Loop with the International Tile Industry

School of Architecture faculty members Joshua Vermillion and Paul Morrison led a multi-disciplinary group of students from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Theater in a design-build elective, sponsored entirely by companies in the tile and coverings industry. The key to these sorts of collaborations between industry and academe is to see the production, fabrication, and assembly process as something that can inform design, and as a result, the design can augment production by strategic design decision-making. This feedback loop, connecting both ends of the design-production continuum, can yield interesting design research questions. One such question arose repeatedly throughout this semester of material research: How to manage the complexity of so many unique shapes and colors as tiles were sawn and processed for the custom mosaics we produced. This design research problem is uniquely suited to be studied with representational explorations as it is inherently anchored within the realm of visual communications. While all design information for a large serpentine wall and custom mosaic composed from over 1600 uniquely cut tiles was stored in a virtual model, many different drawings were produced for various individuals, roles, and stages of the project—a small selection of which are shown here. Specific sheets of drawings were given to those performing sawing operations which choreographed each cut in order to increase efficiency and time, as well as to minimize material waste. Different drawings were created for sorting, storing, and transferring each custom-sawn tile along with assembling them into custom mosaics. These questions will continue to pop up, especially as digital technologies continue to augment the design and production processes by affording us more complexity within the building industry. However, these complexities are still largely reliant on our ability to design well thought-out instructions, drawings, and other documentation that quickly, easily, and beautifully display information.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cfa_collaborate/1007/thumbnail.jp

Robotics in Architecture \u3c\u3e Robotic Architecture: Why Can’t a Building be as Smart as a Car?

The built environment is rich with opportunities for embedding and integrating digital technologies and sensors to create responsive and adaptable systems—to become smarter. This poster outlines selected moments from a thirteen-year body of work in research, design, and prototyping of responsive systems that act spatially with the environment at installation scale. Robotics, sensing, physical computing, and digital fabrication are all topics that have been prioritized by U.S. funding programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education. This poster presents the start of a framework--based around the concept of tinkering--for introducing these systems into design education. Play, experimentation, iteration, and the rest of the qualities of tinkering are certainly not new to design education. Indeed, the larger value proposition is that designers are uniquely equipped to facilitate a tinkering framework to provide novel solutions to complex problems and can provide value to multi-disciplinary teams from engineering and science. As opposed to the STEM disciplines that rely on reductive, convergent research methods, designers are trained for divergent thinking to integrate ideas and solutions at various scales to large problems that can’t be well defined or easily measured.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cfa_collaborate/1008/thumbnail.jp

Iterating the Design Process Using AI Diffusion Models

These studies span research and creative work to interrogate the generative capacity of text-to-image diffusion models that leverage artificial intelligence to produce architectural concepts, ideas, and imagery. These systems can generate an enormous amount of imagery in a very short amount of time based entirely from the written word, and we are still just beginning to understand how these digital tools might augment and/or disrupt, both, the design process, and design pedagogy within the discipline of architecture. These AI models occupy a quickly evolving technology space with tremendous implications for how we design, as well as how we visualize—and verbalize—our ideas. Several AI diffusion model platforms are being tried and tested to iterate various conceptual design ideas, including Dall-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion. The poster graphics show how this process works (in MidJourney, in this case), starting with a text “prompt.” While designers and illustrators are very capable of generating their own graphics to design and communicate ideas, diffusion models offer two different value propositions. The first is speed. Each of these images only take 30-90 seconds to create. The second is the randomness and non-determinant factors from the machine training. The algorithm can produce many different ways to see and interpret that idea, resulting in “happy accidents” and other results that “tickle” the designer’s imagination, leading to further exploration and iteration in this early stage of design and ideation.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cfa_collaborate/1009/thumbnail.jp

Applying Cloud-Based Computing and Emerging Remote Sensing Technologies to Inform Land Management Decisions

Who: Boise State University and Mountain Home Air Force Base What: Creating a species level classification map through the use of Google Earth Engine (GEE), a cloud-based computing platform, to map invasive species When: In-situ data collected in Summer 2018, a continuation of data collected in Summer 2016. Classification was created in Fall 2018. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flights in August 2018. Where: Mountain Home Air Force Base (MHAFB) in southwest Idaho, ecosystem is in the Great Basin Range (GBR) Why: The introduction of exotic species like cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) has drastically altered the fire cycle of the Northern Great Basin (NGB) from 50 – 100 year burn intervals to 10 year intervals (1). Factors such as soil, elevation, temperature, and precipitation can affect the resilience of a sagebrush steppe ecosystem to invasive species. Remote sensing techniques allow large scale analysis of invasive encroachment and assessment of conservation efforts and land management

VERTEX: A Compendium of Research and Design

From the foreword: Vertex was organized to showcase some of the UNLV School of Architecture’s most prominent areas of strength. Our multidisciplinary design foundation program is the initial building block that instills in students an ethos of systematic inquiry through making. Appropriately structured processes of experimentation and production using a variety of tools and media help students develop significant spatial understandings through the sequential act of drawing and making. The spatial understandings developed in the design foundation, supplemented by a culture of inquiry through making that is cultivated in our design studios, prepare our students to creatively engage in a rigorous study of relevant disciplinary subjects that range from the design of arid environments to hospitality, and from building technologies (including design-build) to healthcare interior design. Note: The written sections of the book are featured in Digital Scholarship@UNLV. The complete volume may be purchased at the Buy this book link abovehttps://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/vertex/1000/thumbnail.jp

Joshua Vermillion, Undulating Space

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/ai_possible_futures_images/1000/thumbnail.jp