Within „Design With Debris“ we set out to investigate how digital design can contribute to a circular economy in architecture. Our goal was to build a demonstrator from materials that otherwise would be considered waste. We developed, explored and worked with digital tools to scan, catalog, combine and recombine scrap, offcut material, building debris and rubble into novel compositions and structures. With these tools at hand, we built a self-supporting demonstrator structure.

The “Design With Debris” project was part of the DDU design studio „Designing ReUse“. “Design With Debris” was a collaboration of DDU and ENB, which has been funded by the Sto Stiftung.

In the DDU Studio „Designing ReUse“ participants were tasked to design a fair booth exemplifying novel concepts of reuse and circular economy in architecture. The booth is supposed to host multiple changing activities of visitors and exhibitors. This requires the possibility of changing space over time, facilitated by modular and discrete building components, equipped with reversible connections as well as robots that assemble, dis-assemble and re-assemble. Students learned computational design techniques, digital fabrication, robotic assembly and prototyping.

Teaching Team: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Oliver Tessmann, Max Eschenbach Dipl. Des.

Design Concept: Malcolm Unger

Prototyping Workshop: Zahra Babadi, Mirko Dutschke, Malcolm Unger, Lucas Cornelius

Material Sponsoring: Rosskopf + Partner AG, besonderer Dank an Sebastian Köhler https://www.rosskopf-partner.de/

Funding: Sto Stiftung https://sto-stiftung.de/

The design project by Malcolm Unger addresses the problem of high waste generation in the construction industry and seeks strategies to solve it in the future. The design is based on off-cuts of the material Corian, which normally end up as waste. These off-cut pieces are digitized and catalogued in a database to be reused in a computational design process. In order to maximize the reuse rate of the material, an algorithm creates variations of standardized triangular modules using the offcuts. The modules can be combined in various ways to create diverse patterns. Through a fully reversible construction system, the modules can be assembled to represent a fair booth, as in our prototype, but can also be dis-assembled and re-assembled into other designs.

The design places particular focus on the transparency of the problem of imperfection that arises when using scrap materials. Accurate representation of design intent has to be balanced with maximum reuse of material. By adjusting parameters, a bi-directional design process occurs in which the user has control over accuracy and material reuse rate in the design. Parts that cannot be used to create the triangular modules in the process are used for the production of additional furniture for the fair booth.

To show the technical applicability of the design concept and algorithmic principle, a 1:1 demonstrator was built within a prototyping workshop. All cut-off pieces that were chosen by the computational design process were identified from the component database. Subsequently, the triangular modules were fabricated from the chosen parts. Lasercut joints were designed and fabricated to connect the individual parts of a module, as well as to attach the modules to a substructure. A timber frame was built to support the substructure made from hanging reused aluminium bars.