Digital Fabrications

Digital Fabrications is a collection of essays and half-truestories about design software and hardware. Written from the perspective ofarchitectural design, each piece expands on emerging trends, devices, foibles,and phenomena engendered by an increased reliance on interactions with interfacesin the discipline. 

The essays ask, how do we characterise our post-digital design labor? What arethe politics of design software? How is architecture adapting to a worldlargely dependent on platforms and scripts? What are the spatial mechanisms ofthe internet and VR? Using storytelling techniques, this book  accepts that software is everywhere, and narrows in on a few ways it hastaken command of our cultural products.

From the perspective of architectural design, a field traditionallyassociated with sketching and its own myths of creativity, computers are anessential workplace tool. Projects rely on a wide assortment of softwarepackages and standalone applications, but rarely do architects reflect on thestructure of those programs or how they have infiltrated our disciplinaryconventions. 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 CADdocument, a proprietary BIM file, or anything that describes a projectvisually.

While one way of examining this disciplinary shift might be tore-imagine what digital drawing can be, this collection of essays puts forthanother way: to look at the behaviours, phenomena, collective trends, andoddities 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 ithas taken command of our cultural products.