Teaching DigiFab

I’ve just finished teaching an early start Discovery Seminar here at the University of Washington; Digital Fabrication for Artists or DigiFab for short. These courses are offered to the incoming freshman to get a jump on the college experience.  My department, DXARTS, has for years taught a handful of these courses, introducing students to digital and experimental tools for creating artworks.

While I have been teaching for a few years and was also co-founder of a peer-to-peer educational project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU called DriveBys back in 2004, this class was my first chance to develop and teach my own curriculum.

With this course I aimed to not only introduce students to digital fabrication strategies, specifically laser cutting, CNC milling and 3D Printing, but to simultaneously expose them to a 20th Century art perspective as well as functional prototyping skills.  Despite the fact that almost none of my students self-identified as artists I expected that all of their work and critique should reference and respond to contemporary art practice.

9 Evenings,  Billy Klüver’s milestone art and engineering collaboration, became an important touching stone for the class, looking at a seminal moment in art history where engagement between artists and engineers was held up as a model and evolved into the short lived Experiments in Art and Technology.

Increasingly the idea of FabLabs, make-spaces and other environments in which we can create and build almost anything is becoming a reality.  Just as the internet and the resulting proliferation of technology into our daily lives changed our relationship to information, this new wave of tools promises to change our relationship to stuff.  (And in some quarters this has already happened.)

What this requires is a level of design literacy that includes 3D modeling, an understanding of how different fabrication tools work and what sorts of materials each can handle and what forms they can effectively produce.

Each day began with a listening and drawing exercise, and in most instances students designed for multiple mediums to arrive at their final project idea.  While they learned to model using Rhino, the importance of hand drawing and maquettes in the prototyping process was to quickly develop concrete ideas that took full advantage of the fabrication strategies.  Additionally they were asked to create a variety of different outputs from their Rhino models; the same project might be presented not only as a series of iterative sketches, but also a deliberately labeled and layered files that showed the model constructed, the model as laid flat for cutting or an STL file for printing, and even blueprints that provided specific information about each component.

By the time the students visited some of the fabrication spaces on campus, including the Solheim Lab, they were not only able to clearly articulate their projects both as works inspired by other artworks, but in great specificity about how they would be constructed.  The students showed a great level of engagement and enthusiasm and I wish them all the best of luck in their Freshman year at the UW.

Neha Kunwar: sectioned form inspired by Anish Kapoor

Brendan Beardsley: Endless Suspension

Nicole Scribner: Whole Obelisk

All the student projects can be found here and the class blog is here.

[MT1]Drive-By