Growing Tessellations: Negotiation and Wayfinding in Interdisciplinary Design Practice

Laureen Mahler, Bahareh Barati

As design practices are increasingly positioned in interdisciplinary contexts, origami tessellations present a powerful analogy for navigating shared design processes. This paper explores “growing tessellations”, an innovative approach that integrates craft, biofabrication, and digital fabrication to create dynamic tessellated structures. By examining the relations among diverse processes and making traditions involved in growing tessellations and drawing on Ingold’s theory of entanglement, we illustrate the intricacies of a living design process based on practice-led research methodologies. Our analysis of design events reveals the negotiations and novel affordances of individual processes, and these entanglements are captured through intermediary and final artifacts that are crucial in materializing and nudging diverse becomings. This reconstruction of the design process is aided by the development of a reflective and generative visualization tool, through which we untangle the symbiosis between designing-with and practice-led research, with implications for biodesign, digital fabrication, and beyond.