A Robotic Embrace
What do robots bring to craft? This conversation between design-research group Haptek Lab and ceramics curator Garth Johnson explores scale, tactility and repetition to lay bare the traces of production.
Haptek Lab is a design-research group exploring new applications for robotic and digital technologies in ceramics and architecture. Their work challenges the disconnect between digital fabrication and the haptic qualities of material and craft by developing new sensibilities about digital craft and materiality informed by making traditions from handmade ceramics. Garth Johnson is the Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY.
Haptek Lab Illustration of Feedback Loop, 2021. Vector drawing, photograph of terracotta, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF LINDA ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGIA BARRINGTON
In this interview, Johnson joins Haptek Lab members Linda Zhang and Errol Willett to discuss their recent project entitled Beyond the Surface: The Materiality of Digital Ceramics, which was part of Boston Valley Terra Cotta’s Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop (ACAW) in August 2020. Together they explore the new ways technology shaping craft, making and design through an in-depth look at robotic applications in architectural ceramic design and fabrication.
Garth Johnson: I've got something to kick things off: coming to work every day in the Everson Museum of Art building in Syracuse, NY, designed by the architect I.M. Pei. It’s a perfect analogue for material and non-material that Haptek Lab is exploring. Haptek Lab works with a material feedback loop that is at once architectural, industrial and artisanal. The Everson building is a similar material statement. When I'm describing the building to people, I describe it as “artisanal brutalism.” What I mean by that is how they hand-selected the kind of granite aggregate that went into the concrete. Pei used a local pink granite selected from a quarry north of Syracuse. The material was then exposed through manual bush hammering on the side of the building, on the façade of the building, using templates created out of steel: a pneumatic bush hammer going down every line at 45 degrees and exposing the aggregate. You can only imagine how that person's body working the bush hammer was embedded in the process. But when you truly look at the concrete, I think the manual, gradual exposing and the labour hours that go into the creation of that surface are innately and sort of psychically picked up by the viewer in a type of warmth that isn't normally present in other brutalist buildings, hence artisanal brutalism. Not only that, but there is an indelible record of the creation and the finishing of the building that is like a breadcrumb trail for the curious viewer in a lot of ways.
Haptek Lab Beyond the Surface. Terracotta, underglaze, glaze, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF LINDA ZHANG
Haptek Lab: We're very interested in how we can bring this sort of tactile quality, this breadcrumb trail of innate or psychic tactile qualities, to the architectural scale from the artisanal or craft tradition. One of the questions that was interesting for us was the relationship between technology and the artisanal. Technology is often placed outside of this category and portrayed as something sleek and cold and lacking feeling. At Haptek Lab, we’re pushing back against this, and asking how new digital fabrication and automation technologies can become tools for warmth, tactility and craft. We chose clay as an interface with these craft-based traditions. In working with an architectural scale, economically, one has to work with industrial tools, technologies and manufacturing processes. Even these have a relationship to handwork, not unlike the process of bush hammering the façade of the Everson. Likewise, we are interested in finding such moments within the manufacturing of industrial ceramics where even at such a grand scale, industrial clay might still behave like clay.
““It’s super dense, and you can’t do the same things to this clay that one does with the artisanal clay that we’re used to. You can’t just draw through it and run your fingers through it. It’s abrasive. It’s coarse. It’s like rock.””
GJ: I am excited to see clay behaving like clay, especially within industrial clay and industrial technologies. I've also had a lot of experience with industrial clay, namely terracotta sewer pipes at Mission Building Products in Phoenix, Arizona. These pipes are formed at a super high temperature and pressure by pushing industrial clay through an extrusion die. This extrusion process produces clay elements — here hollow pipes — with a uniform sectional form. They’re similar to the industrial clay extrusions Haptek Lab is using from Boston Valley Terra Cotta. The clay has an incredible density. So much pressure was needed to impact the clay and what technologies would be needed to be able to do so, and that definitely connected with my experience.
HL: It was new for Haptek Lab. We started with standard raw Boston Valley Terra Cotta industrial clay extrusions, which we brought over from their factory outside of Buffalo to Ryerson’s Creative Technology Lab at FCAD in Toronto. There, we started experimenting with various forms of robotic tooling and touching. When we first got some of the Boston Valley clay, we broke it down. We dried out a few of their extrusions and soaked them and rehydrated them and turned them into soft clay. And even having worked with industrial clay in the past, we were still surprised at how different this clay is — it's more than 50 per cent aggregate. It's super dense, and you can't do the same things to this clay that one does with the artisanal clay that we're used to. You can't just draw through it and run your fingers through it. It's abrasive. It's coarse. It's like rock. When crafting building components at an industrial scale, we are trying to learn new ways to embed the sense of touch in materials and think about how that touch resonates for people experiencing the building.
This is where industrial robotic arms came in to play for Haptek Lab. The Creative Technology Labs’ robotic arms have up to 150kg payloads but also six axes of movement, which can be programmed. It allowed us new ways of touching the clay, but also ways that are more bespoke and artisanal in quality than the existing industrial manufacturing technologies at Boston Valley Terra Cotta.
It’s now possible for us to test at a large scale and design through the potter’s feedback loop, to experiment and play, and investigate the squishiness of clay.
LEFT Haptek Lab Photograph of robotic tooling process and QR code to the virtual exhibition of Beyond the Surface at hapteklab.com, 2021. Terracotta, underglaze, 3D printed end of arm tool, 30 x 30 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF JONATHON ANDERSON
RIGHT Haptek Lab Photograph of Haptek Lab member Georgia Barrington in the making process for Beyond the Surface, 2020. Terracotta, 3D printed end of arm tooling, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF JONATHON ANDERSON
GJ: You’ve talked about your initial attempt to draw on the material using the puncturing tool of varying diameter thickness that can make a shallow hole or a deeper hole depending on how deep it is programmed to puncture into the raw extrusions. It’s a non-material working method, where the robot was programmed to tool a digital image without any awareness or feedback of the behavior of the clay. This treats the material as a non-material in the digital design software space: you declared it a bit of a failed experiment. But I actually loved looking at the process. I think it may be a failed experiment in terms of archiving the digital image, but I think that it's so beautiful. I can see and feel the marks and imperfections.
HL: This idea of non-materiality emerged through our conversations. One of the themes we often talk about is what we inherit from our design and making technologies. In design, and especially digital design, software tends to treat everything the same—as a non-material. It’s just a 3D-modelled volume with no material properties or behaviors in the digital software space. This is in part inherited from the technologies we use for digital design. Haptek Lab uses Rhinoceros 3D and KUKA PRC to program our KUKA robots. The computer-aided design software was not designed to account for material behavior, rather it focuses on the design of geometry. It’s very good at modelling complex forms but not yet able to predict or model the ways clay might squish for instance. So even when the robot is simulated digitally it just kind of moves right through the box that is supposed to represent the extruded slab of clay. Even in real life, the robotic arm has no sense that the clay is there. It’s actually strong enough to punch right through the clay. Yet the clay misbehaves, it squishes, pools and sticks and challenges us with these non-material technologies.
GJ: Using materiality to push back against aesthetics is something that is popular across all design disciplines. I would say ceramics were the materials that artists started to first challenge in that way. My background is in pottery, which has a very short feedback loop between generative design and being able to make changes and adjustments. I love the way that you use that feedback loop in this whole project. But in terms of iterative design, potters are able to experiment, create forms and fire them. And within days, make that inform the next experiment in a series that they're working on. I feel like we've only just come to a space where technology has given the tools for designers to be able to shorten that loop in the way that potters have been able to for centuries. But that's an advantage that I think potters, in particular, have had all along.
HL: In Errol Willett’s (a ceramics professor and member of Haptek Lab) pottery class, students have that moment when they finally get it: it's a loop and not a line. The glaze doesn't necessarily follow the form, the form may follow the glaze. Once they see it as a loop, then every process or reaction starts to inform the next. That's how we've been different as a design group. When we started this, we had no idea what the project would be. We were playing and trying to figure out our direction through that feedback loop. We're playing with materials and processes on different scales and trying new ways of learning from the materials.
Technologies are finally making it possible to shorten the loop enough that designers can — like potters — start to use the loop to inform the next iteration of design. This process challenges normative relationships to digital technology as well as the design process. Traditionally, when you’re working on a building façade, you're working with façade engineers; you go through all these iterations on your computer detailing down to the millimeter of tolerance for expansion joints, vapor barriers and so forth. But at best, you can only afford to do one prototype. And you usually just get one shot or two, because it’s expensive both in cost and time. I like this framing of how we might benefit from learning from each other’s design processes, but also the ways in which new technologies might allow for new design processes.
Haptek Lab, llustration of digital and processes, 2021. Vector drawing, photograph of terracotta, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF LINDA ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGIA BARRINGTON
GJ: It makes me so happy to hear the word “squish” in an architectural context. Another theme that you look at is the relationship between hand, gesture and robot. You can see the gradual accretion of marks on material, like on the Everson façade. It's the labor that goes into this that makes it singular and using machines to create surfaces doesn't seem to make materials any less ethereal or otherworldly.
HL: It’s the “what if” that happens in the loop when artists question: what if I apply this 300 times? There's a tool, and a mark just looks like the tool. The mark is not very interesting, but when you repeat that mark enough times, it can be transformed to something else. This was not unlike our process. The initial robotic movements produced default marks which just happened were often very stiff. Rather than trying to make the material behave a certain way, we used the feedback loop to create an iterative series of repetitive patterns and then evaluated them afterwards. They would then inform the next iteration. We had to stop trying to design the outcomes. We’ve been interested in getting the robot to add more soft clay to manipulate and then add and push and add and push. We're getting closer to interesting results.
GJ: There's a sound piece called “Thuunderboy!” where the minimalist composer Tony Conrad gives his two-year-old a Donny Osmond record and a turntable. There is an audio record of this first encounter between toddler and machine, but you can hear the two-year-old spin, reverse and learn to sort of scratch and move across the turntable. It's one of the most amazing human records of material research and discovery through technology, but in this case it's audio discovery by a two-year-old.
HL: It’s a great example of the wonderment that occurs when a tool almost starts to become part of the body. The technology and the hand are no longer so separate, and we discover new ways of touching or engaging with the world. Our work also examines analogous space, where things and meanings can occur in parallel, which is the opposite of the digital. Digits have to be finite: it's either zero or one. In the digital, it's all either/or space. The joy and wonder of the analogue are in the build of meanings — often they’re contradictory or unrelated, but they can run in parallel. And we find that this is the kind of analogue that is found within the feedback loop, with the ethereal or otherworldly which is so compelling to our lizard brains. Conrad’s son explores all of these other analogue positions in slowing it down, reversing, finding that we can’t really know the moment between forward and backwards, slow and stopped. The digital world tends to just present the possibility of on and off but then in the analogue world, it’s possible to find moments of wonder.
GJ: I think there are some things in this project that are wondrous to me that don't necessarily communicate themselves to the audience. One of the things that's crucial is the force that you're having to use, a mega squish.
How do you communicate the ethereal quality of the sheer force needed for the mega-squish and how can that be experienced as a tactile property of the material?
““This quality of wonder and emotional impact that can come out of technology runs counter to common narratives. I think there’s an easy explanation about people flocking to ceramic studios right now because it’s an antidote to holding this phone in your hand all day, but I think this need to connect with clay and craft is fairly common.””
HL: Photos of our industrial clay surface look similar to photos of hand-tooled artisanal clay. We felt it was missing in a lot of large-scale and industrially manufactured ceramic pieces. There is something which can be felt when experiencing the pieces in real life that becomes difficult to communicate through images. We tried to address that divide in the way we set up the virtual reality tour, where the digital audience can have the experience of approaching the pieces. Moving from different scales and seeing the vastness and thickness of the panels renders the force of the mega squish more palpable.
One of the things that always really gives us goosebumps about the robot is knowing that it has a payload of 250 kilograms, and it can literally just throw someone across the room. It could just move through a body the same as it moves through air. It thinks a person is air. Similarly, it has no idea when it's touching the clay.
GJ: Totally! This quality of wonder and emotional impact that can come out of technology runs counter to common narratives. I think there's an easy explanation about people flocking to ceramic studios right now because it's an antidote to holding this phone in your hand all day, but I think this need to connect with clay and craft is fairly common. The focus of your work on digital craft is something that is within that visceral realm, but I don't know how that is perceived by a general audience. I love that you've set up these virtual exhibition spaces that are showing and juxtaposing people and the surfaces that are robot crafted.
HL: It was interesting to work with the large KUKA KR-150 robotic arm, that came off a car assembly line. There are also smaller robotic arms that can be taken on the road. In pre-pandemic times, we had a plan to take them to Boston Valley Terra Cotta for the 2020 Architectural Assemblies Workshop to have one manipulating a piece during the presentation. Instead, we created a virtual reality exhibition and video presentation. In the future, we're still hoping to do that. These smaller robotic arms have a 10kg payload. Playing with this smaller robot is another interesting aspect of this design research because of the scale. The space the robotic arm takes up and its physicality are more similar to a human, yet at full speed it could work more than 10 times faster than any human. The goal is not to replace the human with the robot, but to embed more human-like craft qualities in the manufacturing process: the robot can be a partner in realizing bespoke designs at large scales.
Ultimately, we hope to develop digital craft processes that entangle the visceral qualities of handcrafted surfaces with labor-intensive machine processes. We feel this kind of digital craft evolution will result in more expressive building surfaces and architectural details — engaging the humanism of buildings — and transform the way we experience cities.
Haptek Lab Beyond the Surface series 036 to 052, 2020. Terracotta, underglaze, glaze, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF LINDA ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGIA BARRINGTON
Haptek Lab Beyond the Surface series 001 to 024, 2020. Unfired terracotta, 30 x 90 x 5 cm. COURTESY OF LINDA ZHANG ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGIA BARRINGTON
GJ: This project makes me excited for the future. Even though fired ceramic tiles have a millennia-long history, they’re actually evolving at a very rapid pace right now. Manufacturers like Villeroy & Boch have been using space-age technology to fire their tiles to a high temperature in a matter of hours — rather than days — and this uses much less energy. Boston Valley is using ceramic tiles on an architectural scale that has not been seen before. Most of these changes are invisible to the end user, but your efforts to push the material qualities of ceramic tiles bode well. They inject warmth and an appropriate sense of materiality into ceramic tile surfaces, which don’t have to be sterile and impersonal. Even though mid-century architects like Le Corbusier were pushing the limits of glass and steel, a parallel movement of muralists that had grown out of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression were learning to flex their muscles when it came to creating large-scale murals that reflected the actual material qualities of the clay. It’s not surprising that you’re exploring technology and automation to expose these qualities and restore a sense of the human body to ceramic tiles.
HL: This question of technology in relationship to touch is also a poignant theme in the current context of stay-at-home orders and our increased dependence on technology to interact with one another. Not unlike the parallel movement of muralists or even the recent impulsive flocking to ceramic studios you mentioned earlier, there is this emerging impulse towards softer and more human interactions to counter all of the digital overload we are experiencing. This impulse to restore a sense of touch has also been interesting for us because much of the collaborative work done in the last year and a half by Haptek Lab was done remotely under pandemic health and safety restrictions. One of the things we had to quickly learn was how to use technology in ways that could connect us in haptic and tactile ways. Already today, technology allows us to seamlessly share digital files: 3D scans of tool surfaces, 3D models of robot-end effectors, or even just to livestream the robot as it runs to show team members across two countries. A robotic tool designed in New York can be 3D printed in Toronto and mounted onto the robot and used to mark a ceramic extrusion. The resulting terracotta panel can then be 3D scanned and sent to California to be 3D printed so team members abroad can still touch and experience the surfaces. It all ties back to the quality of wonder and emotional impact you mentioned earlier which is very much embedded in technology but often runs against common narratives. We hope that by engaging technology intentionally and critically we can develop and discover more human forms of touch and making in collaboration with technology. Technology is certainly here to stay. So, rather than accepting the impulse to turn away from technology, we want to embrace it and find ways of addressing that impulse through technology itself.
BIOGRAPHIES
Garth Johnson is the Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art. The Everson Museum of Art’s internationally recognized ceramics collection includes some of the finest representations of modern and contemporary American ceramics in the United States. It is also one of the largest holdings of American ceramics in the nation, with comprehensive collections and archival holdings central to the history of American ceramics.
Boston Valley Terra Cotta® was established by the Krouse family in 1981 following the purchase of Boston Valley Pottery, a company that had been in existence since 1889. Originally a brick manufacturing facility and later a clay pot manufacturer, Boston Valley Pottery was converted to an architectural terra cotta facility by the Krouses. Utilizing both superior terra cotta engineering knowledge and sculpting talent, Boston Valley Terra Cotta has become one of the leading manufacturers of architectural terra cotta in the country.
Architectural Ceramics Assemblies Workshop is a hands-on research and development workshop for architects and facade engineers to explore the use of terra cotta in high-performance facade design. The workshop’s objective is to introduce and consider the properties of terra cotta earlier in the architect’s design process and to develop research and design models between manufacturing and architectural industries useful to the efficient production of high-performance facade solutions.
HAPTEK LAB RESEARCHER BIOGRAPHIES
Linda Zhang, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University School of Interior Design—Architect (team lead)
Linda Zhang is a principal architect at Studio Pararaum (Toronto-Zürich) and an Assistant Professor at Ryerson SID (Toronto). Her research areas include memory, cultural heritage, and identity as they are embodied through matter, material processes and reproduction technologies. She is the 2022 Artist in Residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC), the 2017-2018 Boghosian Fellow at Syracuse University SOA and the 2017 Fellow at the Berlin Center for Art and Urbanistics. pararaum.com
Errol Willett, Associate Professor, Syracuse University School of Art (ceramics)—Artist
Errol Willett is an Associate Professor of Art in the School of Art at Syracuse University. His ceramic art has been shown at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY; the Incheon World Ceramic Center in Korea; and at Art Basel Miami. The installation “Carbon Espalier” was permanently installed in the Crouse Hinds Building on the campus of Syracuse University. errolwillett.com
Clare Olsen, Associate Professor, Cal Poly College of Architecture and Environmental Design—Architect
Clare Olsen is an Associate Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Principal of C.O.CO. Her research focuses on interdisciplinarity, architectural ceramics and design pedagogy, and she is a founding editorial board member of the journal of Technology| Architecture + Design (TAD). Clare’s book, Collaborations in Architecture and Engineering, co-authored with engineer Sinéad Mac Namara, is in pre-publication for a second edition. c-o-co.com
Jonathon Anderson, Associate Professor, Ryerson University School of Design—Director, Creative Technology Lab
Jonathon Anderson is an Associate Professor of Interior Design at Ryerson University and Director of the Creative Technology Lab at FCAD. His work explores how industrial manufacturing, robotics, and CNC technologies influence the design and making processes. Jonathan is co-editing, with Lois Weinthal, an upcoming book titled ‘Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure’ published by Routledge. jonathonanderson.com
Naomi Frangos, Visiting Associate Professor, Cornell University, AAP, Department of Architecture—Architect
Naomi Frangos is principal architect of her own design practice and Visiting Associate Professor in Architecture at Cornell University. Her work operates at the edge of experiments towards buildable design, repositioning contemporary craft through material agency. She received a Design History Society grant for her co-curated exhibition at The Noguchi Museum, her design work for Montreal’s Espace Dance earned a nomination for Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize and is publishing a book on molded glass. naomifrangos.nfarchitect.com
Amy Yan, Research Assistant, Ryerson School of Interior Design — Student
Amy Yan is currently a fourth-year student at the Ryerson School of Interior Design. She is interested in exploring the intersections between design and storytelling in her work, and in finding ways to convey a narrative both visually and spatially. During her academic career, she has worked on design/build and research projects that have been showcased at the Interior Design Show and Come Up to My Room exhibitions in Toronto.
Georgia Barrington, Research Assistant, Ryerson School of Interior Design — Student
Georgia Barrington is a Research Assistant and mature student in her third year at the Ryerson School of Interior Design. Her interests include digital fabrication techniques and spatial explorations of time, memory and heritage. She is the recipient of the Simantha McGugan Memorial Award and is conducting a design research project in partnership with Reese Young, funded by Ryerson’s Creative Technology Lab that explores the hearth as a domestic symbol. georgiabarrington.com
Reese Young, Research Assistant, Ryerson School of Interior Design — Student
Reese Young is in her fourth year of studying Interior Design at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Her eclectic work is guided by her interest in designing real-life and virtual environments that are narrative-based and sensorially engaging. She is currently conducting a design research project in partnership with Georgia Barrington, funded by Ryerson’s Creative Technology Lab that explores the hearth and its identity as a domestic symbol.
This article was published in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Studio Magazine.
