Behavioral Design

This research explores form-finding in bending-active structures, through robotic manipulation of spring steel meshes at a sculptural scale. Our system consists of interwoven metal wires forming a deformable mesh, where robotic control enables manipulation of the structure's vertices. Rather than fighting against material elasticity, this approach harnesses the natural bending behavior of the wires to discover novel geometric configurations. The fabrication process combines robotic control with strategic constraint placement, allowing for systematic exploration of forms that would be difficult to achieve through manual manipulation alone.

 

A key innovation lies in the system's variable constraint methodology, where mesh vertices can be fully fixed, allowed to slide along single wires, or left unconstrained. By varying these constraints, but maintaining consistent robotic pulling motions, we demonstrate how a single initial mesh configuration can achieve multiple stable geometries. This research contributes to our understanding of how local constraint patterns influence global geometric behavior in bending-active structures, while suggesting new possibilities for robotically-assisted architectural form-finding.