TinyZ

The circumstances of the pandemic have resulted in the closure of workshops and Fab Labs and put physical making on hold for fabrication-based design courses. However, with digital fabrication having become a crucial component of design education, involving the critical transition from design ideas represented digitally to being realized physically, alternative approaches needed to be found. Remote making can be enabled by the potentials of small-scale modular machines, which due to their low cost, are easily distributable and can be shipped to each student in a design studio. The use of at-home fabrication offers new possibilities for project-adaptive prototyping tools. Desktop scaled fabrication tools designed to reach a distributed audience abound in industry, academia, and amongst DIY-ers. Drawing from these precedents, a desktop milling machine called the TinyZ was developed to support digital fabrication in an architectural studio held at MIT in the Spring of 2021. The machine was designed to be an easily reconfigurable rapid prototyping tool intended to adapt to evolving design processes. The TinyZ Kit introduced students to the basics of machine building, electronics, and computer numerically controlled (CNC) programming. The outcome of the studio showed the potential for different home labs to develop specializations and to collaborate by out-sourcing, offering a way for students to work together remotely. Finally, the work of the studio demonstrated that new material processes developed remotely could return to fab labs and extend the capacities of shared maker spaces.