Stop Motion Animation as a Tool for Sketching in Architecture (original) (raw)

Widely acknowledged as an archetypal design activity, sketching is typically carried out using little more than pen and paper. Today’s designed artifacts however, are often given qualities that are hard to capture with traditional means of sketching. While pen and paper sketching catches the character of a building, it may not equally well capture how that building changes with the seasons, how people pass through it, how the light moves in between its rooms from sunrise to dawn, and how its facade subtly decays over centuries. Yet, it is often exactly these dynamic and interactive aspects that are emphasized in contemporary design work. So is there a way for designers to be able to sketch also these dynamic processes? Over several years and in different design disciplines, we have been exploring the potential of stop motion animation (SMA) to serve this purpose. SMA is a basic form of animation typically applied to make physical objects appear to be alive. The animator moves object...