Week 1 Tutorial: Orientation

Week 1's studio — meeting your pair, the toolchain, and the round-trip thesis

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Have your enrolment sorted and your own laptop charged. Nothing else to prepare — this is the first session.

In the session#

1. Attend a short talk on the round-trip thesis. The course’s name comes from its shape: a physical object becomes digital (scanning, projection mapping), the digital becomes interactive (sensors, code, rule systems), and the interactive becomes physical again (fabrication). Every studio from here on sits somewhere on that loop, and the talk exists so you can place each week on it as you go rather than experiencing the semester as an unrelated string of techniques. It also explains why the course is dual-audience: half the room arrives strong on art and craft, half arrives strong on programming, and the loop only closes if both halves’ skills are in the room.

2. Get matched into your studio pair. Pairing puts one art-proficient student with one programming-proficient student. This isn’t group work in the usual sense — you’re not splitting a deliverable in half, you’re each mentoring the other across the semester’s weaker half of the loop. The art-proficient half leans on their pair during weeks 3 and 7 (Programming I and II); the programming-proficient half leans on theirs during weeks 1–2 and 9–10 (digitizing, projection mapping, fabrication). Both of you are individually assessed throughout — the pairing is support, not a shared grade — but Studio Brief 1’s crit (week 4) explicitly asks you to name what your pair contributed, so treat the mentoring as real from today.

3. Build a free-form object from studio scrap. There’s no brief beyond “make an object” — the point is something to scan in step 4, not a polished artefact. The studio’s scrap bins hold cardboard, paper, scissors, box-knives, tape, and similar offcuts; a tutor can point you to them if you can’t find them. A few construction methods worth knowing before you start cutting:

   • Slotting, for something rigid and demountable: cut a tab on one piece and a slit slightly narrower than the tab’s thickness on the other, then push them together — no glue or tape needed, and you can take it apart and redo a piece if it’s wrong.
   • Tabs and flaps, for a box-like form: fold flaps out from each face, then tape them to the adjoining face from the inside so the outside stays clean. This is the fastest method if you’re not fussed about demounting it later.
   • Scoring for curves: cardboard bends cleanly along its grain (the direction the internal corrugation runs) and cracks or creases unevenly across it. Score a shallow line with the back of a scissor blade or a box-knife along the grain where you want a curve, and it folds smoothly instead of buckling. Cutting across the grain, by contrast, is how you get a clean straight edge or a piece that needs to stay flat.

   Box-knives are the one tool here that draws blood if you’re careless with them — always cut away from your other hand, and ask a tutor before using one if you haven’t before.

4. Scan the object on the digitizing station. A tutor runs the station and will walk you through it the first time — you’re not expected to know the scanner already. The scan doesn’t need to be perfect; a rough model with a recognisable silhouette is enough, because what matters for next week is that the object has real, physical irregularities (curves, gaps, angled faces) rather than a computer-generated shape’s clean geometry. That’s what makes next week’s projection-mapping calibration a genuine problem instead of a trivial one.

Afterwards#

You leave knowing your studio pair, with the toolchain installed and checked, and with a 3D model of your own cardboard object — the thing week 2’s projection-mapping tutorial throws computed light onto. Nothing is marked this week; Studio Brief 1 (week 4) is the first graded work, and it’s the first place your pairing shows up in what you submit.