A Better World by Design Conference

As one of the volunteers, I am very proud to take a small part in this nation-wide event. As much as I wanted to be more fully involved over the whole weekend, I was only able to participate in 2 workshops.

The first workshop that I attended was called “Open Source Robotics” where a RISD faculty, Paul Badger discussed about Arduino boards. Arduino boards are computer circuit boards that can interact with other software programs. As much as this workshop was interesting in terms of broadening my horizon to other software products that I was not aware of, I felt that this workshop was a little too advanced for me to fully understand since I am not tech savvy at all. However, I felt there is a huge potential for industrial designers in this field because Arduino boards are the foundation for interactive devices and in order to design interactive devices and systems, understanding what makes things interactive is important.

The second workshop was called “Bamboo: Structural Grass”, conducted by Miya Buxton, a second year graduate student in Architecture at RISD. She visited Indonesia to study vernacular building structures and became fascinated with architectural capabilities of bamboo. Bamboo is not tree so it has different structural qualities than that of other trees used in construction. With the direction and understanding of fiber in mind, one can design beautiful geometric forms with bamboo. It grows very tall in a very short amount of time (which helps with sustainability issues: more materials in less time and land area) and thickness and sizes vary according to species. As an alternative source for construction material, bamboo is ideal for smaller houses but it is crucial that there is a way to grow bamboo locally to reduce carbon footprints. It would defeat the purpose of sustainability if one were to import bamboo from overseas because transporting bamboo via ship exhausts gasoline or diesel, contaminates the sea and threatens the sea creatures. This workshop widened my knowledge of bamboo in terms of its structural qualities. Inserting metal parts such as a screw is not as effective as inserting a thin piece of bamboo when making joints. Utilizing nature on its own method works the most effectively with bamboo.

This allows a different approach to designing architecture because the designer has to design around what it does the best. Most interestingly, those vernacular building structure was developed over centuries ago when there was not advanced technology like the modern days. They learned from the nature, time and the experiments which we often overlook now. We can learn so much from the nature and just with time passing but we are always in a rush to find out the answer in the quickest way that we often do not get to enjoy the process and the excitement of investigating.

Miya’s soft voiced presentation made me forget about how busy and fast the design world is nowadays and imagine the old days when they approached architecture not as a mean to make more money and fame but to construct a functional residence area that was also aesthetically pleasing.

I wish that after RISD I get to design in an old fashioned manner so that my design reflects most of my thinking that was not too heavily influenced by the politics of the real world.