Architects begin with quick hand drawings. These gestural images produce highly personal, even quirky qualities that have traditionally defined translation into buildings. As the initial hand drawing gets passed through the normative process of computation and measurement these qualities get lost. Manufacturers and engineers further rationalize the thing to make it predictably economical and structural. Digital Hand resists these sterilizing forces and seeks to preserve the original gestural quality throughout the design and fabrication process. Important in the effort is a delicate transcription of hand-drawn imagery into digital geometry. An intuitive parallel is setup between sketching with charcoal and sketching with vector data. Additionally, the project leverages an emerging inflated metal fabrication technique called FiDU, which promises to liberate designers from the serial production and analysis methods of normative construction. Digital Hand is about exploring a new interface between intuition and digital line, between hand and constructed line.
