Of Hands and Robots: Creativity and Learning in Architectural Robotics

This paper explores ways to incorporate robots into design education, especially in architecture, in ways that privilege students' visual, tactile and spatial engagement with design problems. The paper is informed by constructionist theories of learning and studies of science and technology (STS) re-thinking agency as relational and distributed. We use these lenses to document two introductory learning experiences in architectural robotics, conducted as part of an architecture graduate course. The exercises combine robotics, scripting, model-making and sketching in ways that emphasize, and take advantage of, designers' visual, spatial, and material sensibilities, as well as the contingent nature of human-robot encounters.