Experimental Pressure-Forming: Adding Value through Tooling Improvement, and a Hypothesis for Tooling Provision in Autonomous Development Environments

This paper describes improvements to pressure forming techniques, metal-forming methods related to industrial processes, but suited to lower capitalization contracting or do-it-yourself (DIY) fabrication settings. Working from academic and popular literature and previous research into double-axis curvature metal forming, the author describes advancements to the tooling. Discussion connects fabricators’ situational constraints to value constructs surrounding making’s particularity as research, and relationships with the constraints and values of autonomous development construction networks. This paper argues that maker-researchers’ exposure to tooling environment, ergonomic, and spatial constraints upon workmanship allows unique knowledge production particularly applicable to certain sectors of real estate supply. Conceivably members of construction technology networks underpinning housing development share these constraints, and may receive unique benefits from maker-researchers’ approach. This paper proposes a tooling provision methodology to test this hypothesis in Tai O, an autonomous development market near Hong Kong, connecting technological research with real estate development within the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and China’s Great Bay Region.