Research Cluster 2 explores the potential of robotic systems, lightweight structures and shape-changing materials in architecture and design. For many years, designers have envisioned building systems that can respond and adapt to multiple human, environmental and structural conditions. Recent technological advancements in robotics enable machines to be self-aware, and to plan and react to undetermined circumstances. Integrating robotic solutions into elastic material systems makes it possible to create novel structures that can self-form, reconfigure and achieve multiple states, operating and interacting at architectural and human scales. This approach can generate systems that achieve motion leveraging material behaviours. Compared with conventional rigid body kinematic systems, elastic kinetic structures can adapt to continuous changes of internal and external conditions with a minimum amount of energy and material resource. Throughout the year, students were introduced to multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, art and engineering. The cluster strove to develop novel adaptive material and structural systems that could achieve multiple states of equilibrium. The integration of actuation principles based on pneumatic and cable-driven approaches, with elastic, bending and tensile material behaviours, generated lightweight kinetic systems. These robotically controlled systems leveraged material behaviours, responding to changing human, environmental and structural conditions. Each team focused on a different design context to create structures that could respond to human emotions and other criteria, such as music. Parallel to the design of a new physical system, the work focused on the development of novel methods to

control the behaviour of these continuously changing material and structural systems. Custom algorithms were developed to compute system choreographies and control data based on feedback such as human and sound data. This approach allowed the designer/choreographer to generate a continuously changing system by integrating design intentions and physical feedback. At a conceptual level, our research explores the role of robotics in architecture, moving beyond its role as a tool, towards the notion of robotic spaces, structures and building systems. This approach opens new possibilities for interactions between human, material and machine systems.