Save the Date: Recorded Craft to Scaled Robotics: Capturing, Translating and Scaling Human Making

Workshop: 23-27 November 2026, Le Mans, France

What happens when a human making process becomes data that can be edited, repeated, exchanged, scaled, and fabricated somewhere else?

This November, the SCALExD Workshop moves to Le Mans, France. TALM hosts the week on-site with students from IAAC, and the University of Arts Linz joining online, for a one-week intensive on how human making practices can become transferable digital fabrication knowledge.

What’s coming?

Participants will begin with a simple physical act, such as drawing, carving, brushing or shaping a material surface, and follow it from capture to robotic fabrication. The week will close with a large-scale industrial manufacturing vision.

An emerging production model

• Architecture and construction: a craft gesture is captured once, transformed digitally and redistributed across facade panels, tiles or interior surfaces, with geographically separated facilities producing compatible components.
• Design and craft industries: the signature of a craftsperson is digitised without being reduced to a CAD model, enabling digitally archived craft processes, bespoke furniture and limited production runs.
• Art and cultural production: collaborative remote sculpture, interactive installations, concept car design interfaces and artefact restoration workflows.

Learning objectives

Students will:

• Understand the transition from 1:1 human-scale craft to automated manufacturing
• Capture physical interventions through geometry (3D scanning) and trajectory (motion tracking)
• Develop Grasshopper definitions to abstract, scale, mirror, array and transform gestural data
• Execute robotic fabrication workflows on industrial robotic arms
• Formulate speculative distributed manufacturing scenarios for large-scale deployment

Who’s leading?

The workshop is led by Pit Siebenaler, Researcher at IAAC working at the intersection of robotics, manufacturing and material research, and Alexandre Dubor, Architect and Head of IAAC’s Robotics Lab.

Part of the Erasmus+ SCALExD project, which covers travel and accommodation for the workshop days.

Image note: the photos in this post are from a previous workshop at IAAC with Heatherwick Studio and are shown for illustration only. They do not depict this workshop.