Production-Immanent Design by Sigrid Brell-Cokcan & Johannes Braumann / KUKA

Robotic arms are best known from the automotive industry, where they are used to perform repetitive task with high accuracy and repeatability. Today, these multifunctional machines open up new possibilities for young designers and architects, as they enable completely new fabrication strategies at a much lower cost than most multi-axis CNC machines.
A crucial step towards establishing robotic arms as valuable machines for the creative industry is the development of new software that goes beyond the scope of common CNC software.
This workshop will introduce participants to KUKA|prc (parametric robot control), a robot-control and simulation plugin that extends the accessible parametric modelling environment Grasshopper beyond design. While common CAD-CAM workflows rely on multiple software packages to pre- and postprocess data, the integration of robotic fabrication into a parametric environment allows designers to create new workflows that inherently consider the constraints of fabrication processes and can be constantly evaluated and optimized in regards to e.g. reachability and kinematics. We refer to such a process as production immanent design.
These highly optimized processes allow designers and architects to economically realize designs with a degree of customization and individualization that would otherwise be impossible to do with industry-standard CAM-software.

This workshop is kindly supported by KUKA Robotics.

What participants can expect to learn in this workshop:
Participants will be introduced to the concepts of production immanent design, manufacturing parametric designs, and controlling a KUKA robot from within the parametric modelling environment Grasshopper. We will explore ways how to intuitively define complex fabrication processes via graphical programming.