DIGITAL MAKING STUDIO
3D DESIGN AND DIGITAL FABRICATION
Dartmouth College Winter’26
Digital Making Studio explores the creative potentials of digital design and fabrication. The course offers experiential learning, showing how ideas take form through iterative processes of modeling, making, and reflecting. It emphasizes the dialogue between digital tools and material processes, encouraging students to approach design not as a preconceived idea but as an evolving mediation between concepts, techniques, materials, and technologies.
Students will gain foundational skills in 2D and 3D modeling, learn core fabrication methods, including additive (3D printing), subtractive (laser cutting, CNC), and formative (folding, bending), and experiment with analog and digital workflows. Alongside technical skills, students will also explore how different forms of representation, such as drawings, models, and digital images, help communicate design ideas and mediate between thinking and making. The course cultivates a studio culture of experimentation, critique, and collaboration with the attention to safety, sustainability, and responsible authorship.
Course Objectives
Course Overview
Over the last half-century, art, architecture, and design have been shaped by a complex and sometimes contradictory interplay between ideation, craft, and digital technologies. These trajectories have never evolved in isolation; instead, they have intersected, diverged, and recombined in historically situated ways, generating both ruptures and continuities in how creative practices are understood and enacted. This course approaches these shifts through the lens of digital craft; a practice where craft techniques and embodied knowledge are transformed, expanded, and reimagined through computational tools and fabrication technologies. Rather than framing craft and technology as opposites, digital craft emphasizes their mutual shaping. It foregrounds material intelligence, process-based making, and the role of the designer–maker within digital workflows.
In this studio, weaving serves as a central reference point, introduced as an algorithmic method of thinking and making. Processes of weaving, patterning, and coding are treated as structurally and conceptually analogous: each operates through rule-based interplay between design, material, and technology, generating form through iteration. Within this framing, craft, particularly weaving, is understood not merely as material practice but as a creative onto-epistemological practice that shares foundational logics with computational processes.
Throughout the term, students will be invited to reflect critically on their own processes and the creative potential of digital tools. They will learn to see code as material, material as data, and making as a dialogue between human, machine, and matter. The emphasis will not be on producing a perfected object, but on cultivating a deeper understanding of digital craft as a speculative, situated, and evolving practice.
The course unfolds in a hybrid studio format that integrates theory and practice. Tutorials, readings, critical discussions, and studio work will scaffold weekly learning, culminating in a final project. Students will gain foundational skills in digital modeling (Rhino), parametric design (Grasshopper), image editing (Photoshop), and AI-based ideation (DALL·E), alongside hands-on practices with looms, laser cutters, and 3D printers.
The culminating assignments will emphasize process over product, encouraging experimentation, discovery, and reflection, including the ability to learn from failure. The final project will present each student’s evolving understanding of digital craft within the context of the Digital Making Studio. By the end of the course, students will gain foundational skills in 2D and 3D design for fabrication, develop an iterative and process-based approach to design, and cultivate the ability to critically analyze how techniques, materials, and technologies shape creative practices.
Students will gain foundational skills in 2D and 3D modeling, learn core fabrication methods, including additive (3D printing), subtractive (laser cutting, CNC), and formative (folding, bending), and experiment with analog and digital workflows. Alongside technical skills, students will also explore how different forms of representation, such as drawings, models, and digital images, help communicate design ideas and mediate between thinking and making. The course cultivates a studio culture of experimentation, critique, and collaboration with the attention to safety, sustainability, and responsible authorship.
Course Objectives
- Explore iterative making practices through prototyping and material experimentation, guiding students to move between digital design and fabrication.
- Provide instruction in digital and analog tools, including drawing, modeling, and fabrication techniques that support visual, spatial, and material exploration.
- Present frameworks for critical engagement with tools, techniques, and materials, emphasizing how art and design practices are shaped by cultural, technological, and material contexts.
- Develop skills in documentation, communication, and critique, including the articulation of conceptual intent, recording of workflows, and participation in a collaborative studio environment.
Course Overview
Over the last half-century, art, architecture, and design have been shaped by a complex and sometimes contradictory interplay between ideation, craft, and digital technologies. These trajectories have never evolved in isolation; instead, they have intersected, diverged, and recombined in historically situated ways, generating both ruptures and continuities in how creative practices are understood and enacted. This course approaches these shifts through the lens of digital craft; a practice where craft techniques and embodied knowledge are transformed, expanded, and reimagined through computational tools and fabrication technologies. Rather than framing craft and technology as opposites, digital craft emphasizes their mutual shaping. It foregrounds material intelligence, process-based making, and the role of the designer–maker within digital workflows.
In this studio, weaving serves as a central reference point, introduced as an algorithmic method of thinking and making. Processes of weaving, patterning, and coding are treated as structurally and conceptually analogous: each operates through rule-based interplay between design, material, and technology, generating form through iteration. Within this framing, craft, particularly weaving, is understood not merely as material practice but as a creative onto-epistemological practice that shares foundational logics with computational processes.
Throughout the term, students will be invited to reflect critically on their own processes and the creative potential of digital tools. They will learn to see code as material, material as data, and making as a dialogue between human, machine, and matter. The emphasis will not be on producing a perfected object, but on cultivating a deeper understanding of digital craft as a speculative, situated, and evolving practice.
The course unfolds in a hybrid studio format that integrates theory and practice. Tutorials, readings, critical discussions, and studio work will scaffold weekly learning, culminating in a final project. Students will gain foundational skills in digital modeling (Rhino), parametric design (Grasshopper), image editing (Photoshop), and AI-based ideation (DALL·E), alongside hands-on practices with looms, laser cutters, and 3D printers.
The culminating assignments will emphasize process over product, encouraging experimentation, discovery, and reflection, including the ability to learn from failure. The final project will present each student’s evolving understanding of digital craft within the context of the Digital Making Studio. By the end of the course, students will gain foundational skills in 2D and 3D design for fabrication, develop an iterative and process-based approach to design, and cultivate the ability to critically analyze how techniques, materials, and technologies shape creative practices.
