Grasshopper Canvas with Kinect Interaction: Part 3
This post – part of a series of 3 posts on the Kinect Multitouch Interaction – is a detailed technical walkthrough of the code we implemented to support touch from depth. The downloadable code that this post refers to is in Part 2 in the series. This post is meant to serve as a foundational primer for the major modules of the code that build up the touch-from-depth interaction.
Grasshopper Canvas with Kinect Interaction: Part 2
Over the past year, we’ve made the Microsoft Kinect sense touch – and in turn, gestures – which we then used to control the Grasshopper canvas via keyboard and mouse events. We’ve had a lot of fun building Kinect Multitouch Interactions but – being an architecture firm – we can only spend so much time developing the code. We think we’ve created a solid foundation and would like to share with the broader community to use, modify, and extend. Obviously, Grasshopper is only one possible application and we’d love to see what others could do. In the spirit of openness, we’re providing the complete source.
Happy Holidays 2011 from LMN
Happy Holidays 2011 from everyone at LMN.
This Holiday Season, LMNers lit candles…LOTS of candles. The video was directed, shot, edited and produced by: cbaker, jbeaver, scrawford, cgrammens, kgregga, thenderson, ahunter, kkimura, amacdonald, and gshaw.
Confessions of a Design Technology Evangelical
Guest blogging at Metropolis Magazine, Dan organizes his Field Notes. (Meanwhile, the Design Desk Liberation Front launches another photographic assault). For an pseudo-retro-iconoclastic-interlude to all this computational fetishism, go read the Confessions of a Design Technology Evangelical.
Still Life with Design Technology
George Shaw – managing partner at LMN – on Re-Upping on Design Technology: a bit of history on the ideas and projects that led to LMNts. In Metropolis Magazine’s POV section.
Energy Monitoring 101: Open Standards
In almost every architectural project we undertake at LMN, we urge the client to seriously consider sub-metering and energy monitoring. After years of recommending this, we decided to “eat our own dog food.” We wanted to understand the underlying costs, infrastructure changes, and digital tools necessary for proper energy monitoring so – for our office – we put together our own customized solution based upon open standards hardware and software. Here’s a detailed account of how it’s going…
DIVA is Awesome and Everyone Should Use It
We’ve been playing around with the DIVA plugin for Rhino and Grasshopper for the past month. DIVA stands for Design Iterate Validate Adapt which is similar to the approach that we take with parametric modeling.
By looking at a large number of iterations it often is possible to tease out patterns of performance which can help to find a “satisficing” solution and help designers to develop a better intuition about how to approach a problem.
Flexible Grids in Self-Structure Exhibition
Our flexible grid research project is currently being exhibited at Le Lieu du Design in Paris. While preparing materials for the exhibition we decided to try and build a longer version of the flexible grid. Our previous grid prints were sized to take up roughly half of the print bed (5″x7″) of our Objet Alaris30, but for the exhibit we wanted something bigger. We ended up being able to get an 8″x20″ version, and learned a number of lessons along the way.
LMNts at Build Boston
Stephen Van Dyck and Scott Crawford of LMN Architects will be presenting some recent work at this year’s Build Boston conference on November 17 as part of a session about Generative Design. The event is sponsored by the AIA’s Technology in Architectural Practice (TAP) group. http://www.buildboston.com http://network.aia.org/technologyinarchitecturalpractice/Home/
3D Printer Reproduction Continues
Assembly of the RepRap Mendel coming along slowly but surely. The physical assembly is nearly done. We’ve been using the SolidWorks model as our guide. After building one or two of the individual assemblies (the Z-drive or the Y-guides, for example), you begin to perceive the design logic behind the RepRap: get close, assemble, adjust, repeat. This is the second in our series of posts on building the RepRap Mendel.
Seattle Design Festival 2011
If you haven’t done so already, mark your calendars for next month’s 1st ever Seattle Design Festival. Taking place on September 16th – 25th, all events are open to the public and many events are free. Tours, films, panels: 10 days of architectural design and product design, industrial design and digital design. Sponsored by the AIA Seattle and lots of other good folks.
Grasshopper Canvas with Kinect Interaction: Part 1
In a previous post, we elaborated on how more real estate for the Grasshopper Canvas can be beneficial and usable with Wiimote interaction. Since then, we have been toying around with the Microsoft Kinect (more so after the release of the beta version of the Kinect SDK for the PC), looking to identify a more [...]
ACADIA/FLATCUT Competition Entry
A few of us in the office (kbeck, scrawford, svandyck) put together an entry for the partition category of this year’s ACADIA/FLATCUT competition. We made it into the group of finalists (despite formatting our boards incorrectly), but unfortunately we were not selected as the winner (probably because we formatted our boards incorrectly, only kidding). The competition put forth an interesting challenge: use both rigid and flexible sheet materials to create an assembly (light, furniture, or partition) that highlights the properties of each material while minimizing the amount of waste. Included are the images and text from our submission as well as the final boards.
3D Printer Reproduction Begins
We’ve begun 3D printing our second 3D printer. We are using the Objet Alaris to print the parts for the RepRap Mendel, the second generation of open-source self-replicating 3D Printers. So far, we’ve managed to print most of the parts and gather most of the off-the-shelf hardware necessary. We’re ready to start putting it all together.
Med Mart 5: Panel Fabrication
As we developed our precast panel surface geometry, we found ourselves increasingly pushing the limits of our rendering engines. We knew that natural light could potentially reveal different effects on the complex surfaces, and physical models would be the only trustworthy method of study to ensure a more predictable final product. The fabrication process of the model paralleled the fabrication process for the full size panels. Our close collaboration with the form-liner and precast fabricators helped to fine tune the design beyond our initial assumptions.
Med Mart 4: Facade Design Coordination
The ambitious schedule of the Cleveland Med Mart project required us to reexamine and retool some of the ways we design, document, and deliver a project. As the leaders of the design effort, we knew that we would need to find and build smart connections between our generative design tools and our documentation process in order to not only meet deadlines, but also adapt to the parameters that were developing throughout the design-assist process. This post outlines our linking of Grasshopper and Revit – through a custom utility called Cricket …
AIA Seattle whichCRAFT? Dialogs
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011: Part of the continued AIA Seattle 2011 Series on Craft comes the full day forum entitled WhichCraft? Dialogs. A full day of panel presentations and dialogues will explore the multiple definitions of Craft for architects and help to explore directions for future work. In the morning, Dan will take part in the panel discussion called “speculativeCraft” – including specialists from Boeing and Walsh Construction – which will be moderated by Kimo Griggs of the University of Washington.
Med Mart 3: Daylighting the Atrium
In this post, we move into the interior to talk about how we are using daylight inside the building. A major feature of the design is a large central atrium with a four-story structural glass wall facing the Mall. While providing a good amount of natural light to the atrium, this entirely glazed edge also contrasts greatly with the three other non-glazed walls. We knew we needed a strategy to more effectively balance the light levels throughout the space, and our goal was to achieve that with natural lighting.
Med Mart 2: Panel Texture and Geometry
While studying the overall configuration of the Medical Mart facade, we were also developing textural concepts for the surface of the precast concrete panels. We were interested in using the surface texture of the precast concrete panels to build increasing layers of detail to what will be a very large scale facade. With very little time to execute the study and produce a constructable solution, we knew we needed to develop a faster way of generating ideas. Our working process developed rapidly into a focused study of rectangular surface forms.
Form Finding with Flexible Modules
Panelizing free-form surfaces is usually done using a large number of uniquely shaped pieces. A free-form surface can also be approximated using a predetermined module. The advantage is being able to limit the number of unique pieces necessary to fabricate that surface.
For this experiment, the module was flexible between panels, but each panel is rigid. A set of forces are then established between each module to control the relationships between modules once they are pulled to the base surface.
Med Mart 1: Generation of Facade Geometry
From the beginning of our design work on the facade system for the Cleveland Med Mart, we desired to develop a system that would give the building multiple layers of varied, unifying texture, legible from multiple scales. Initial explorations of this concept focused on the textural capacities of precast concrete panels and later move on to studying the process for panelizing the entire facade with precast and glazing units. Parametric modeling allowed us to explore many iterations of the facade while also keeping control of the information needed for fabrication.
Be Together 2011 Takeaways
LMN again had the honor of presenting at this year’s Bentley user conference, Be Together. This year we presented two sessions: “Bentley Architecture Dynamic Views Best Practices” and “Customizing the Task-based Interface in MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 2)”. Click below to download the presentation materials from these sessions. One note of caution: The best practice documents contain [...]
Symposium: Craft Kraft craft
The UW College of Built Environments is hosting a two day symposium on High Performance Craft. The event will bring together a number of practitioners and thinkers working at the intersections between emerging technologies and building materials, new and old.
Med Mart: Introduction
This is the first in a series of post that will describe LMNts involvement in the design of the Cleveland Medical Mart. In February of 2010, a joint partnership between Merchandise Mart Properties (MMPI) and Cuyahoga County chose LMN Architects as the designer for the Cleveland Medical Mart and Convention Center project. The Cleveland Medical Mart and Convention Center is the city’s most prominent effort to date in reinventing itself as the country’s hub of medical research and trade activity.