ROB|ARCH: Beyond Optimization was hosted in Toronto / Tkaronto, Canada, on May 21-25, 2024. It included eight hands-on workshops, three keynotes, and twenty-five paper presentations. Check out the wrap up edit below!
BEYOND OPTIMIZATION
The growing presence of robotics in art, research, design, and construction has changed the way we practice and think through our tools. Since 2012, when the first ROB|ARCH conference was held, the role of robotics in creative practices and manufacturing industries has grown, shifted, and evolved. Robots are no longer a shiny novelty restricted to niche research proposals but are now a fundamental technical tool for interfacing between digital and physical worlds.
Even our understanding of what a robot can look like has evolved: the inter-disciplinary discourse that has emerged around digital fabrication machines and industrial arms now includes myriad robot morphologies, scales, and applications — think aerial machines for construction, choreographed robotic swarms in performance, millimeter-scale robots for medical applications. In some ways, we have witnessed our machines grow up along with the discipline; no longer restricted to the structured environments of research labs, they have entered the real world and taken their place within it.
Acknowledging the momentum of these shifts within our broader social, political, and environmental contexts, ROB|ARCH 2024 urges its community to reflect on this moment with a critical lens. We aim to create space for discussion across technical and critical discourses that welcomes a diverse group of researchers, artists, and thinkers in robotics and beyond.
ROB|ARCH 2024's workshops, including video and prototypes, were featured in Beyond Optimization: ROB|ARCH Retrospective, an exhibition put on at Toronto's InterAccess Gallery.
— Workshops
— Publication
— Keynote Lectures
— Hosts
— Location
Hosts Organizations
University of Toronto – John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
Toronto Metropolitan University – Design + Technology Lab at The Creative School
Poster by Paul Howard Harrison
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We wish to acknowledge this land on which the ROB|ARCH 2024 events were hosted. For thousands of years Tkaronto has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Tkaronko is in the “Dish With One Spoon” territory. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and Peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. Today, this place is home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.