Biography
Maria Yablonina is an artist, researcher and designer working in the field of robotic fabrication with a focus on custom, task specific machines for making.
Currently Maria is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction at the University of Stuttgart.
Maria’s research focus is in the area of Robotic Fabrication and Computational Design in Architecture. In particular, she works with bespoke tools, robots and methods designed to perform fabrication tasks in an on-site environment. In her work she argues that in the field of digital fabrication designers and researchers need to look beyond existing machines and start inventing their own architecture-specific custom robotic tools for construction and fabrication tasks. Maria’s work includes development of hardware and software solutions as well as complementing material systems intended to extend the existing catalogue of methods towards addressing the inherent scale, cost and barrier of entry limitations of conventional robotic fabrication processes
What’s your biggest motivation to get up every morning?
A combination of whatever project I am working on at the time, my teaching practice and coffee 🙂
My practice implies solving design, mechanical and computational problems on a daily basis. I often find myself waking up with an idea for a solution I have been trying to tackle for a few days. Additionally, I am fortunate to be working with incredible collaborators and students in my day to day practice. Anticipating these interactions is a powerful driver for me to get to the office a little early.