ABSTRACT
Material and the machines that manipulate it are vitally connected and reciprocally constrained. To exploit the possibilities of materially informed machine design, architects must be trained with a new set of skills hovering at the intersection of material science, mechanical engineering, and design computation. This chapter presents the systematic development of the epistemic project around machine-material interaction through research the seminar Expanded Mechanisms conducted at Harvard GSD over the past four years. Drawings are endemically synchronic, representing a temporally static frame. The native pulse of the digital and electromechanical system is the signal. Signals have basically different properties drawings. One of the more remarkable adaptations of manual methods for material deformation through automation is the process of incremental forming. Researchers in the seminar roboticized two types of incremental forming: impacting and bead rolling. Signalization, in its most physical sense, is intimately concerned with the behavior of structured electromagnetic fields.
