Visualizing making: Shapes, materials, and actions

•Making is integral to design reasoning.•We distinguish between making of and making for in design.•Making of and making for in design respectively value control and uncertainty.•Making for can be formalized as part of a shape computation in design.•Additional to shape transformations, we formalize new kinds of transformations in 2D and 3D.

The increasing interest in materiality currently challenges the long existing traditions that consider visual thinking as the primary actor in design creativity. Shape grammars offer a formalism to represent visual reasoning in design, which is never purely limited to the visual aspects of design processes. Aiming to develop ways to explicitly include material manipulation in a computational formalism, we report on an ongoing exploration of how shape computation extends beyond abstract visual shapes to incorporate material shapes that have a physical existence. We present a materially informed process with shape rules and show that we can apply these rules creatively to explore the physical character of the material.