John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

adapting the technology adoption model it was hoped that it would give a clear
frame of reference for how the technologies are being integrated into practice by
practitioners. In the application of these three stages to the database of
designed objects the researcher’s ambition was to make explicit whether a
relationship could be discerned between the designed objects and their
development through computer-based design and fabrication technologies.
4.6.2 Klein group model
One of the researcher’s stated objectives for this research study was to develop a
contemporary version of Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Klein group’ model from the essay
‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (Krauss, 1979) that takes into consideration
developments in the field from the use of digital technologies. The researcher
acknowledges there are many such possible versions of this model. However,
the version developed in this study reflects the researcher’s practice and
interests out of which the original research questions emerged.
The researcher began the updated Klein group with the category of ‘digital
sculpture’ as that which is ‘not architecture’ and ‘not product design’.
(Obviously within this study this concerns examples that seek to re-examine
object making using computer-based design and fabrication tools from a
synthetic or pluralist perspective). This was expanded to include the implicit
relationships of these negative terms to their positives (‘architecture’ and
‘product design’) as a set of binary pairs. As well as these five categories the
researcher indicated three new positions that this conjunction granted the
‘permission’ to think of: the conjunction of ‘product design’ and ‘architecture’,
the conjunction of ‘product design’ and ‘not product design’ and the conjunction
of ‘architecture’ and ‘not architecture’.
The researcher contacted Rosalind Krauss (now a professor at Columbia
University) by email and sent an intermediate version of the updated model. It
was pointed out the research aimed to map an area of practice that exists in the
space between existing, conventional notions of creative disciplines. And that it
proposed the work done with computer-based design and fabrication
technologies forms a hybrid cultural discourse that could operate as a means of
coordination and alignment across disciplines and a means of translation
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