Sketching with Robots

Today, human activities constitute the primary environmental impact on the planet. In this context, commitments to sustainability, or minimization of damage, prove insufficient. To develop regenerative, futuring capabilities, architectural design needs to extend beyond the form and function of things and engage with the management of complex systems. Such systems involve multiple types of dynamic phenomena—biotic and abiotic, technical and cultural—and can be understood as living. Engagement with such living systems implies manipulation of pervasive and unceasing change, irrespective of whether it is valued by design stakeholders or actively managed towards homeostatic or homeorhetic conditions. On one hand, such manipulation of continuity requires holistic and persistent design involvements that are beyond natural capabilities of human designers. On the other hand, practical, political, or creative implications of reliance on automated systems capable of tackling such tasks are as yet underexplored. In response to this challenge, this paper considers an experimental approach that utilized methods of critical making and speculative designing to explore potentials of autonomous architecture. Presented experiments combined knowledge of animal architecture with intelligent behaviors of robotic devices