48-545 Design Fabrication
3–9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Design Fabrication is a core course that interrogates the act of making, the logics of material behavior, and the evolving landscape of contemporary fabrication methodologies . It offers an intensive, hands-on immersion into a diverse palette of materials—including timber, metal, plastic, bamboo, plywood, plaster, wire, and various natural and synthetic fibers—with the aim of cultivating a nuanced understanding of their intrinsic properties, performative behaviors, and spatial potentials. At its core, the course emphasizes formal and tectonic inquiry through the generation of intricate geometries and assemblies. These explorations are deliberately situated outside the constraints of site specificity, client directives, or contextual mandates, thereby privileging a purist approach to material expression and fabrication intelligence. Students will be introduced to an array of analog and digital fabrication techniques, including but not limited to 3D printing, CNC milling and forming, vacuum forming, pressure lamination, hydraulic pressing, casting, weaving, and detail development for disassembly-oriented systems. Through iterative processes of making, the course nurtures tacit knowledge and intuitive sensibilities—both essential to advancing a "thinking-through-making" design ethos. The pedagogical trajectory follows a progressive sequence—Design - Tooling - Detailing - Prototyping - enabling students to rigorously interrogate material performance and assembly logic. Emphasis is placed on the careful selection and synthesis of materials and fabrication strategies to yield inventive formal articulations across local, regional, and global contexts.
Prerequisites: none listed
Offered: Spring 2027, Spring 2026
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