Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet - Hardcover

Galo Canizares; Foreword By Ellie Abrons; Book Design By Anthony Zukofsky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1943532516 ISBN 13: 9781943532513

Publisher: ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design, 2019

Synopsis

• This book uses storytelling techniques to tackle what might be considered a highly technical aspect of design: software
• Includes coverage of recent projects and writings by emerging scholars and designers
• Covers a broad range of digital media such as social media, internet browsers, virtual reality, photogrammetry, and the history of computer aided design
• It is geared towards architects, designers, and educators interested in critically examining their everyday tools, as well as anyone interested in how software itself shapes cultural products
• It goes beyond a technical explanation of contemporary software and interfaces, and touches on their social and aesthetic values

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-true stories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective of architectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles, and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfaces in the discipline. The essays ask: how do we characterise our post-digital design labour? What are the politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a world largely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms of the internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionally associated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are an essential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of software packages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on the structure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinary conventions. PDFs and JPGs are as much a part of our vocabulary as plans, sections, and elevations. A drawing today might refer to a rendering, a CAD document, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a project visually. While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be to re-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forth another way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, and oddities emerging as a result of global software proliferation. In other words, this book accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it has taken command of our cultural products.

About this title

About the Author

Galo Canizares is a designer, writer, and educator at the Ohio State University's Knowlton School of Architecture. His work blends absurdity, genre fiction, world-making, simulation, and parafiction to address issues in technology and the built environment. Galo Canizares is the recipient of the 2016-17 Howard E. LeFevre '29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship, and in 2018 was awarded the 2018-19 Christos Yessios Visiting Professorship at the Ohio State University. His collaborative architectural practice, office ca, won the 2018 Ragdale Ring competition. Foreword by Ellie Abrons. Book Design by Anthony Zukofsky.

Edition details

• Publisher: ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1943532516
• ISBN 13: 9781943532513
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200