Projects investigate craft practices through ethnographic fieldwork, computation, and digital technologies to restore, remediate, and reconfigure these practices for new understandings, approaches, tools, methodologies, and theories. This includes developing new manual and digital tools to engage in past, present, and future crafts. Projects develop novel approaches to computational design education through craft and vice versa and repatriate these knowledges. New theoretical understandings of the relationship between craft, architecture, computation, and digital media are also sought. Mathematicians are welcome! Related areas include:
- Situated Computations
- Interrogative technology design
- The Bailey-Derek grammar
- New Structures + Tectonics
- Wire-bending Theory + Architecture
Publications:
(Upcoming 2021) Mathemalchemy project and exhibition.
(2019) Vernelle A. A. Noel. “Reviving a Craft through Architecture: Computational Making of a lightweight pavilion based on wire-bending techniques,” in Form and Force, Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures Annual Symposium 2019 – Structural Membranes 2019 – IASS, Barcelona, Spain. (October 2019).
(2019) Noel, Vernelle A. A. 2019. “A Framework for Repairing Craft: A Case Study on Wire-Bending in Trinidad & Tobago.” Pennsylvania State University.
(2017) Vernelle A. A. Noel. “From Costuming and Dancing Sculptures to Architecture: The Corporeal and Computational in Design and Fabrication of Lightweight Mobile Structures,” in Future Trajectories of Computation in Design. Proceedings of Computer Aided Architectural Design Futures Conference – CAAD Futures, Istanbul, Turkey. (June 2017): 22-41.
(2016) Vernelle A. A. Noel. “Crafting as Inquiry into Computation: Exploring wire-bending in traditional practice and design education,” in Complexity & Simplicity. Proceedings of the 34th Education and research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe Conference (eCAADe), University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, (August 2016): 311-320.
(2015) Noel, Vernelle A.A. 2015. “The Bailey-Derek Grammar: Recording the Craft of Wire-Bending in the Trinidad Carnival.” Leonardo 48 (4): 357–65. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01089.
Projects:
(2020) Lightweight textile pavilion studio
(2019) Weaving and Macrame studio
(2012) New Textiles