Through the Looking-Glass: A Synthetic Practice Model of Technê and Poïesis in Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing

This research establishes an operational synthesis between digital and physical materials and tools as poetic (poïesis) and technical (technê) expressions as a new hybrid practice model. My practice model opposes a traditional dualistic separation of digital workflows and traditional making and material understanding. I bring forward three operational methods to define a practice model able to overcome the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century schism of intellectual from manual labour, as well as the nineteenth-century gulf between automatic mechanisation and poetic creation.

The first articulates the transfer of physical traces into digital environments and reversely fitting digital objects into the narratives and values of cultural artefacts. Antithetical to the first method, transformation formulates an emancipation of transferred data through materialising transformations in constructed cultural contexts. This research is able to synthesise the previous dialectics, articulating the notion of Digital Craftsmanship in the form of a collaborative practice in which methods of transfer and transformation collapse into a dialogue between practitioners from craft, science and engineering, enabling the emergence of new hybrid objects, materials, tools and associated values and narratives.