The yearly international symposium on “intelligent fabrication” is organised by the LéaV research laboratory of the ÉNSA Versailles. Each year has a focus on a different approach on current design practices with digital means and what it means for the designer.

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Our design practice has progressively been evolving for the past few decades to incorporate digital design tools. Simultaneously, digitisation has been infiltrating the manufacturing world with an unprecedented speed. Digital fabrication has not only enabled cheaper and faster production but through its democratization, has also brought back the designer at the centre of the manufacturing process.

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Similarly, ecology has finally been piercing through the industry and attracting manufacturers, designers and engineers towards integrated thinking, optimisation and material knowledge.

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In an attempt to address these topics, it has become common for teaching curricula to include “learning by doing” as a principle, notably through 1:1 scale construction in addition to scaled models. Consequently, architecture and engineering schools have had to adapt by creating manufacturing facilities within their premises thus creating novel relations between materials, manufacturing and design. These experimental digital approaches have had the merit of stimulating the interest of the research world towards the manufacturing one and have therefore induced an exchange of knowledge between parties that struggled to communicate.

 

Geometry, topology and materiality can be seen as a common denominator and driver of design between architects, engineers and fabricators. Current tools try to bridge the gap between these protagonists. The symposium explores and questions some of the current developments of (digital) fabrication techniques, low carbon construction techniques, parametric geometry, discretized architecture, real scale and digital prototyping and the current (digital) tools (algorithmic design, topology optimisation, parametric design, biomimicry) available for conception. We also put into question the role of these approaches for pedagogical purposes and especially the experiential pedagogy. The speakers are academics, makers, practitioners, architects and engineers.