Robot House faculty members Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ‘11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ‘11), traveled to San Francisco in October together with the lab’s Staubli TX60L 'baby robot' for a day-long workshop on 5-axis robotic fabrication held at the ACADIA 2012 Synthetic Digital Ecologies conference. Focused on technical and creative applications using robots, the workshop featured a demonstration of the custom robot control plugin for Maya developed by Kruysman and Proto at SCI-Arc.

On view during the 2012 ACADIA weekend was the Wild Cards exhibition at the California College of the Arts, which explored ideas of leveraging material and materiality as a 'wild card' in the design process. Contrary to many recent digital design processes where emergent complexity is internalized in a controlled model, in this exhibition materials and material properties act as wild cards: "objects of low probability, but high impact." Modes of control and precision were questioned through the unpredictability of materiality, recombined with digital techniques and precision. Approaches to craft and fabrication, previously focused on precision and control, were reconceived as techniques opened to play, fluctuation and erratic behavior. An intentionally vulnerable position, these projects relinquish design agency in order to embrace risk and material propensity.

Exhibiting SCI-Arc faculty and alumni included Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative, Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini, Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ‘11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ‘11) of Kruysman│Proto, and Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ‘03) and Gaston Nogues (B.Arch ‘94) of Ball-Nogues Studio.