The art and craft of tiling mosaics is deeply connected to the city of Barcelona and its history. Mosaics, with their intricate designs and vibrant colours, can be seen adorning many historical buildings and public spaces in the city. Like many other traditional crafts, it heavily relies on highly skilled artisanry to produce aesthetically pleasing results. However, the advent of modern digital fabrication techniques offers a transformative potential to this age-old craft.
In this workshop, we explore the possibilities that the merger of traditional craft and modern digital fabrication techniques bring to the designer’s table. We begin with an exploration phase, iterating and discovering different tiling design options for the target surface. These designs are articulated using the geometry kernel of the COMPAS framework for parametric geometry generation. The journey progresses to materialising these designs using a collaborative robotic setup, offering hands-on experience in robotic planning, control, and sensing applied to the art of tiling.
The work will be carried out using a workflow fully integrated into the Rhino/Grasshopper design environment.
Participants will not only gain practical skills but also an appreciation for the importance of open-source tools in ensuring the digital sustainability of the design and fabrication processes. This approach democratises access to advanced techniques and fosters a community of shared knowledge and resources.
The workshop will present an integrated software and hardware workflow for robotic tiling. At the end of the workshop, participants should be able to:
Aim To explore innovative parametric tiling designs through the utilization of robotic tiling setups. The project aim is to utilize the functions of COMPAS framework and its extensions for robotic planning. Also, to incorporate computer vision and scanning information into the tiling process to enhance precision and efficiency. Design Logic Inspired by the idea of … Read more
AIM DESIGN The three distinct design methodologies we explored employed grayscale image mapping, where the gray areas functioned as attractors and filters for colored circles. Our second experiment focused on employing curves as generators for the spatial arrangement and packing of a variety of larger circles. The third methodology extended our exploration to the incorporation … Read more
This project documents a 1-week workshop that introduced students to the COMPAS framework. Our goal was to design a tile mosaic that would be part of a collaborative pick-and-place workflow with the UR5, incorporating COMPAS Fab, Kangaroo (Grasshopper), and ROS. What is COMPAS? Utilizing the COMPAS framework developed by Gramazio Kohler Research and the larger … Read more
