Visualizing the Operative and Analytic: Representing the Digital Fabrication Feedback Loop and Managing the Digital Exchange: Fid-Bau Portal

Visualizing the Operative and Analytic: Representing the Digital Fabrication Feedback Loop and Managing the Digital Exchange

Klinger, Kevin R. / Vermillion, Joshua

Abstract

Digital architecture is process-based and reliant upon a conversation between digital visualization, analysis, and production. With the complexity of information generated in process-based digital practices, we need to effectively manage and exchange the information. Feedback loops are integral to this process/product, and thus require extensive management of complex versions of visual and data related information. Quite a lot of scholarly attention has been focused upon highlighting innovative projects using digital fabrication and serial customization. However, there is a scarcity of scholarly work about innovations in visualizing and representing the design data integral in this feedback loop. This paper will examine innovative representational devices such as the matrix, sectioning, layering, bracketing, nesting, and other new forms of organizing, visualizing, analyzing, and simulating complex data, intent upon communicating multiple levels of operations during the design and fabrication process. With a rigorous taxonomy of operative and analytic devices for process-based digital design development, we can begin to outline a trajectory for future evolutions in practice. This writing is an attempt to make a few steps in this direction, and demonstrate some of these new representational ideas in practice.