Design public bench BRIDGE

aluminumwithout armrestscurved

University of Detmold - Computational Design and construction In a compact 5-day workshop, students created several real size folded furniture prototypes from ALUCOBOND® panels. The workshop is part of the series “digital crafting“ – a methodological, didactical design concept which intertwines design and production process. While developing their individual design concepts, students focussed on material properties and behaviour, and digital processing techniques. Using their self-created software tools, they automatized and adapted processes of structural analysis, form finding as well as the creation of production data (G-Codes) for the available CNC machines. With these tools the students were immediately able to create realistic prototypes taking the most significant material and processing details into consideration which, of course, led to basic adaptations in the conceptual design. This way of “material thinking“ and process-driven design represents a bottom up approach in design development. Tal Friedman has designed a bench made entirely from one sheet of flat ALUCOBOND® aluminium which is then cut, folded and fixed into its final shape. Using curved folds his goal was to achieve an optimal relationship between strength, material constraints, folding limits and aesthetics.