Towards Fabrication Information Modeling (FIM) : workflow and methods for multi-scale trans-disciplinary informed design

Abstract

This thesis sets the stage for Fabrication Information Modeling (FIM); a design approach for enabling seamless design-to-production workflows that can derive complex designs fusing advanced digital design technologies associated with analysis, engineering and manufacturing. Present day digital fabrication platforms enable the design and construction of high-resolution and complex material distribution structures. However, virtual-to-physical workflows and their associated software environments are yet to incorporate such capabilities. As preliminary methods towards FIM I have developed four computational strategies for the design and digital construction of custom systems. These methods are presented in this thesis in the context of specific design challenges and include a biologically driven fiber construction algorithm; an anatomically driven shell-to-wearable translation protocol; an environmentally-driven swarm printing system; and a manufacturing-driven hierarchical fabrication platform. I discuss and analyze these four challenges in terms of their capabilities to integrate design across media, disciplines and scales through the concepts of multidimensionality, media-informed computation and trans-disciplinary data in advanced digital design workflows. With FIM I aim to contribute to the field of digital design and fabrication by enabling feedback workflows where materials are designed rather than selected; where the question of how information is passed across spatiotemporal scales is central to design generation itself; where modeling at each level of resolution and representation is based on various methods and carried out by various media or agents within a single environment; and finally, where virtual and physical considerations coexist as equals.