Human Machine Virtuosity - Syllabus
Spring 2015 - Tue/Thu 10:00AM-11:20AM, Hunt A10
16-455/48-530 Human-Machine Virtuosity: Hybrid Skill, Fabrication and Design
Human dexterous skill embodies a wealth of physical understanding which complements computer-based design and machine fabrication. This project-oriented course explores the duality between hand and machine through the practical development of innovative design and fabrication systems. These systems fluidly combine the expressivity and intuition of physical tools with the scalability and precision of the digital realm. Students will develop novel hybrid design and production workflows combining analog and digital processes to support the design and fabrication of their chosen projects. Specific skills covered include 3D scanning, 3D modeling (CAD), 3D printing (additive manufacturing), computer based sensing, and human-robot interaction design. Areas of interest include architecture, art, and product design.
This course is part of the new Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology (IDeATe) program at Carnegie Mellon University and makes use of the new IDEATE@Hunt Collaborative Making Facility in the lower level of Hunt Library. The course is a new elective offered under the Intelligent Environments and Physical Computing concentrations. The prerequisite is one of the appropriate IDeATe portal courses or instructor permission. The main course website is at http://human-machine-virtuosity.org.
Enrollment is limited to 25 students, drawn from all departments. The central IDeATe principle is to bring together students from multiple disciplines to develop hybrid skills. Students will be expected to learn skills from outside their home discipline, but more importantly, to develop their abilities to collaborate in diverse groups.
Upon completion of this course the student will be able to:
The essential focus of this course is to understand the nature of dexterous skill. This idea exists at the intersection of traditional craft, design process, manufacturing, and robotics. By understanding dexterous skills we can develop systems to enable hybrid skills. The following sections elaborate on this focus through a discussion of the underlying questions of human-machine virtuosity.
Our particular concern is with skills related to the use of tools in the process of fabrication, i.e. handcraft. This is distinct from non-tool-based fabrication skills such as bare-hand clay forming, or non-fabrication skills such as musical performance. The following questions may help inspire inquiry into the nature of these skills.
The human body is a marvelous instrument which we are far from replicating. Instead we create tools which augment and extend our skills, then learn to apply those tools.
A central thesis of the course is that human skill wielding a physical tool can be deeply expressive in a way which is complementary to the precision and scalability of digital design tools. This is a middle path between pure traditional craft and industrial manufacturing which uses entirely different processes. Perhaps in the future we will invent new robots which can dextrously wield tools in a way which responds to material variation, or new industrial processes which more closely simulate handcraft. But even then the question remains of creating design processes which can retain the richness of handcraft.
There are several means we will explore for creating system for hybrid skills:
The space of possible outcomes is vast, so the following questions may help to resolve which student projects fit within the scope of the course.
Hand tools and related skills are already optimized for particular materials. For cost and practicality reasons, the course will focus on relatively low-cost materials such as wood, wax, foam, sand, clay, sheet metal, and plaster.
The essential material questions related to hybrid skills are as follows:
The purpose of the course is to develop novel design tools which combine human skill and digital means. The success of the projects will be gauged along two trajectories: 1. whether they create an enjoyable and robust design experience, encouraging sustained practice 2. whether they create potential for the creation of compelling and novel design artifacts.
Designed artifacts are often considered as static entities but computational and fabrication processes are both intrinsically temporal. The usual resolution of this duality is that a design represents an outcome of a process, with a choice of the degree of history legible in the form.
The hybrid nature of digital transformations offers other resolutions. For example, a non-physical process simulation could produce an artificial history unrelated to the actual material processes so that the legible result would combine the actual and the fictional in a novel way.
A strength of digital representation is mathematical description of form. Hybrid systems offer opportunities for superposition of mathematical and natural form, e.g. for geometric discretization and rationalization, or for combining closed-form features such as catenary curves, circles, ruled surfaces, or topographic isocontours with organic variation. An example of a prompting system supporting this would be a dynamic French curve that projects geometry extrapolated from gesture in real time.
The assignments come in two categories: a series of quick skill-building exercises and two projects. The exercises will generally be performed in teams, with students taking turns developing the various skills, observing, and documenting.
The projects will be developed in groups comprising four to five students. Each group member will be expected to teach skills to their group members, learn new skills outside their home discipline, and collaborate to reach a common objective.
Many of the assignments will be developed in the context of the lab workstations. These comprise a table surface, a digital projector and RGBD camera, and supporting structure. These will be enhanced by the students as needed to support the instrumentation for their particular workflow using resources from the Physical Computing Lab.
A series of scripted exercises will introduce students to the fundamental structure and mechanics of hybrid-craft approaches.These exercises will primarily be delivered as in-class assignments and will emphasize the development of technique and skillsets over the creative solution of more open-ended problems presented in the projects.
Students will choose a hand-tool related to a historically significant craft (e.g. ceramics, metal-work, wood-work). Students will investigate their chosen tool through physical experimentation and background research to develop intuition about hand-craft’s complex interplay between physical dexterity, material affordance, and tool geometry.
In this exercise students will:
Students will fabricate five table-top frames to mount electronic peripherals for real-time sensing and visual feedback. Throughout the semester, these workstations will provide a physical context to explore the possibilities of augmenting physical dexterity with digital tools for novel design approaches.
In this exercise students will:
Students will create a high-fidelity, digital reconstruction of a found object (or fragment of an object). Choosing an object should be based on the student’s previous observation and practice in that the texture, geometry, or surface quality of the object could be approximated using the hand-tool(s) from Exercise Two. Students will then digitally transform (e.g. morph, tile, aggregate) their reconstructed object and rely on digital simulation of hand-tool paths and CNC produced patterns/templates to assist in producing a new physical artifact by hand.
In this exercise students will:
Students will create an algorithmically generated pattern, projected onto a 2’x2’ canvas, to prompt fellow classmates in free-hand sketching experiments. Patterns should be informed by fundamental compositional techniques (e.g. translations, reflections) and computational processes (e.g. agent based behavior, particle simulation, physics simulation, point attractors). Patterns should also be time-based exhibiting emergent behaviors, narrative arc, and/or rule based growth.
In this exercise students will:
Expanding on the dynamic patterning of Exercise Four, Students will add an interactive element to the creation of new patterns. Students will augment a drawing implement with a digital sensor to update pattern generation in real-time. Patterns will again be projected onto a 2’x2’ canvas.
In this exercise students will:
The two group projects represent the major creative effort of the course. Each of the projects is expected to build progressively from the exercises, although students are encouraged to renegotiate group membership for each phase as their own ideas evolve.
The overall project objective is to create novel hybrid design and production workflows consistent with an articulable design approach. These workflows will combine analog and digital processes in ways that suit the strength of each and support the design narrative.
The projects are built around the relationships between input, transformation, and output. The skill exercises will explore techniques for conventional input of shape and gesture, parametric transformation, and output of form and design data. The projects will build upon this with development of novel tool instrumentation, transformations motivated by a design concept, and output through multiple stages.
The scope of the first project is to prototype a custom instrumented tool and create a user feedback system based on algorithmic transformations consistent with the fabrication process and design intent. This will extend our notion of ‘input’ to include more intimate measurement of human intent, and the notion of ‘transformation’ and ‘output’ to be more goal-directed. This will highlight the interaction between gesture and design.
Objectives:
Deliverables:
The scope of the second project is to extend the system to include physical fabrication and iteration. This will extend the notions of ‘transformation’ and ‘output’ to include both mathematical and physical machine processes. This will explore the effects of incorporating the analog qualities of physical materials into a purely digital process, and the balance between human gesture and machine fabrication. The final projects will be highlighted in a curated end-of-semester show.
Objectives:
Deliverables:
Each group project requires disparate skills, including design, programming, CAD modelling, physical computing design and fabrication, manual dexterity, writing, videography, and documentation. We recognize that group members will often gravitate to their personal area of expertise in the interests of efficiency. We require that each person also undertake an articulable role outside their comfort zone. We also require that each person with a particular expertise assist and teach others operating in their domain. We will evaluate your engagement through frequent group review and interview. Not everybody will become expert in everything, but everybody must develop fluency to enable collaboration. This is the core principle of IDeATe and the foundation of project-oriented practice-based coursework.
Each assignment is graded on a six-point scale spanning three categories: concept, execution, and documentation. Each category receives 0 to 2 points on the following scale:
The final grade is weighted with 40% for each of the two projects, and 20% for all exercises combined.
Please note that the basic grade is a 1/1/1; receiving a 2 in a category reflects a bonus point to reward exceptional work. You will likely receive many ‘1’ scores, and this does not mean necessarily mean you are doing badly in the course. This may be in contrast to previous grading systems you have encountered in which perfection is attainable.
Please note also that much of the feedback on your work will come in the form of critique and commentary rather than simply your numerical scores. Please attend to this; the commentary will be a much more substantive guide to your personal learning process than the scoring.
Each project will also include a peer evaluation component. The purpose of this element is to identify the specific contributions of each group member to the project outcome. Individual scores for a project may vary from the group score based on peer reports and instructor observations.
Hybrid Human-Digital Processes
Temporality and Design History
Exercise 3: Reverse Engineering
Exercise 5: Interactive Sketch
Project 1: Instrumented Tool with Transformed Feedback
Project 2: Iterative Digital-Physical Transformation