Designing with the Uncontrollable

From 10–12 September 2026, the Design Modelling Symposium (DMS26) will take place at EPFL Lausanne and Fribourg, Switzerland, bringing together researchers, architects, engineers and designers working at the intersection of design, computation, materials and fabrication.

The 10th edition of the symposium is titled “Care to Decide (?) – The Art of Designing with the Uncontrollable”. The conference addresses a central question for contemporary design practice: what happens when designers no longer seek to fully control the conditions of design, but instead learn to work with material behaviour, environmental conditions, machines, artificial intelligence and other forms of agency?

Three days, three perspectives

The programme is structured around three broad thematic perspectives: designing with materials and the machine, designing with people and the machine, and the changing role of computational decision-making. Across the three days, keynote lectures, research papers, case studies, a Research & Practice Hackathon, laboratory tours and exhibitions explore different forms of human–machine and material–design interaction.

Day 1 – Lausanne

The symposium opens with Corentin Fivet and Stefana Parascho, followed by a keynote from Kirstin Hagelskjaer Petersen (Cornell University), “Emergent Construction in Insect and Robotic Swarms.” The first day also features a Research & Practice Hackathon, a lab tour and exhibition, and a keynote by Anne Katrin Burghartz (schlaich bergermann partner) entitled “The Art of Engineering Art.” The day concludes with a welcome reception.

Day 2 – Fribourg: Circularity and Fabrication

The second day begins with Deepika Raghu (ETH Zurich) and her keynote “AI-Driven Building Stock Intelligence for Circular Construction.”

The morning paper sessions focus on circularity, including computational approaches to modular reuse, structures made from reused parachute fabrics, reusable formwork and reconfigurable shell structures.

The afternoon shifts towards circular timber and fabrication. Among the contributions are research on reclaimed timber, robotic joinery, material deviations and computational frameworks for working with existing building elements.

Particularly relevant to questions of digital fabrication is Paper Session 3, “Fabrication”, with contributions including:

Repositioning Control: Advancing Natural Fiber Composites in Architecture
Directional-Field-Based Segmentation for Digital Fabrication Constraints
Fib-Earth Slab: An Adaptive Design-to-Fabrication Framework
From Craft to Component: Scaling Dry Lacquer Heritage through Material-Informed Additive Manufacturing

A second fabrication session addresses robotic mosaic construction, mineral printing, scan-to-CAD workflows and the negotiation between material, performance and fabrication.

The day concludes with a keynote by Jenny Sabin (Cornell University), “Biosynthetic Design: Choosing What to Leave Undecided.”

Day 3 – Humans, Computers and Materials

The final day opens with Mascha Fehse (HBK Saar / OH-Studio Berlin) and the keynote “Designing Endurance: Thinking Space with Materials, Energies, Users, Atmospheres and Other Agencies.”

The morning sessions focus on human–machine collaboration, including robotic assembly, adaptive timber structures, collaborative design networks and strategies for designing with uncertainty.

One particularly interesting contribution is Seiichi Suzuki’s “Encoding High-Complexity Digital Models Into Accessible, Low-Tech Fabrication and Assembly Instructions”, which examines the translation between complex computational models and accessible fabrication processes.

The afternoon turns towards computers and timber. Topics include material learning with neural networks, material-responsive design, self-shaping wood, full-scale prototyping and fabrication-aware optimization.

The final keynote is given by Mennatallah El-Assady (ETH Zurich), “Humans, Machines, and the Space Between: Engineering Effective Human-AI Partnerships.”

From constraints to design resources

One of the particularly interesting aspects of DMS26 is its focus on situations in which control is incomplete or impossible. Materials have their own properties and histories, reclaimed elements introduce deviations, fabrication processes impose constraints, and computational systems increasingly participate in design decisions.

Rather than treating these conditions simply as limitations, many of the contributions investigate how they can become active components of the design process.

This makes the symposium relevant not only to computational design and architecture, but also to broader questions in design research: How do material and technical conditions influence design decisions? How can constraints be translated into design strategies? And how can experimentation with tools, materials and fabrication processes generate transferable design knowledge?

The combination of theoretical contributions, case studies and full-scale experimentation makes DMS26 a valuable platform for exploring these questions from different perspectives.

The complete programme, including all speakers, paper sessions and events, is available on the Design Modelling Symposium website.