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Course Review: Design Workshop Series | "Digital Design Foundation" Course Outcomes — "Breathing" Kinetic Installation Design

Course Overview

Under the "Grand Design" vision of the School of Design, the Design Workshop launched a series of courses, including Digital Design Foundation (renamed as Digital Intelligent Making in the new curriculum plan). Instructed by Xiaokai Liu, Fan Zhang, and Yichen An, this course was open to students majoring in Environmental Design (Class of 2024) and Industrial Design (Class of 2023). The curriculum centered on a cross-disciplinary exploration of digital technology and life narratives. Using digital technology as a medium to connect physical spaces, mechanical structures, and emotional experiences, the course aimed to develop students' full-path construction capabilities—spanning from poetic concept generation and digital modeling to structural reasoning, physical fabrication, and dynamic presentation.

This project focused on "Breathing" as a core biological instinct and emotional metaphor. It guided students to utilize AI tools to expand their multidimensional perspectives across biology, mechanics, interaction, and materials, allowing them to conduct design experiments within a limited-scale installation space. Students simulated the subtle yet rhythmic movements of living organisms through mechanical methods, such as the reciprocating extension of servo linkages and the flexible fluctuations driven by eccentric wheels. This successfully transformed abstract perceptions of life into viewable, touchable, and experiential dynamic interfaces.

Relying on the experimental center platforms of the Wood Workshop and Clay Workshop, and integrating digital processing methods like laser cutting and 3D printing, the course guided students to solve physical construction challenges through experiments with origami structures, louver systems, elastic materials, and composite components. Through continuous iterations from digital models to physical mechanisms, students transformed cold digital skins into spatial installations filled with a sense of breathing, rhythm, and emotional warmth. This achieved a poetic response to the pulse of life in the digital age.

Student Project Outcomes

01.Resonance Cavity （共鸣腔）

● Design Team: Zhizhen Li, Yuqin Du, Ziying Liu

● Design Description: Centering on "breathing" as its core imagery, this installation utilizes rhythmic pneumatic power from an air pump to drive eight sets of airbags inside the box, causing them to rise and fall in an orderly sequence. Enclosed within an acrylic shell, the expansion and contraction rhythms of the airbags replicate the inhalation and exhalation patterns of life. This mechanism transforms invisible "breath" into a perceptible visual motion. It serves as a microscopic reproduction of respiration and a minimalist expression of biological rhythms, allowing viewers to touch the resonance between breath and existence in moments of silence.

02. Ripple Chroma Impression （涟光印象） 

● Design Team: Jing Qin, Jiayang Song, Meirui Wang

● Design Description: "Ripple" represents the initial imagery of movement, "Light" acts as the carrier of the final outcome, and "Impression" defines the ultimate perceptive state of the viewer. The installation attempts to translate invisible mechanical fluctuations found in nature through a mechanical and optical system, transforming them into a visual poem that invites contemplation and immersion.

03. Mirror Breath （镜息） 

● Design Team: Shuangyi Zhang, Jingyi Yang, Saiyidan, Jiaxuan Chen

● Design Description: This piece utilizes "breath" as the emotional bridge between the viewer and the installation. By combining distance sensors, mechanical transmissions, and the opening and closing of origami structures, it constructs a dynamic form that embodies the rhythms of life. When a viewer approaches, the sensing system detects their presence and gently awakens the dormant flower. The flower slowly unfolds through a mechanical rhythm, mimicking a deep breath; as the viewer moves away, the petals gradually close up and return to a state of tranquility.

04. Chord · Motion （弦·动） 

● Design Team: Xing Gao, Yudie Xu, Jinghan Huang, Chenxi Ding

● Design Description: The installation features a structured and rigid acrylic mechanical skeleton that delivers a strong sense of industrial machinery. We have embedded the concept of "breathing" within this rational framework: as airflow passes through, the extended white and red long strings tremble gently. Each oscillation signifies a cycle of inhalation and exhalation, breathing lifelike vitality into the cold machinery. Using a motor as its power source, the installation employs a transmission mechanism composed of large and small wheels, gears, horizontal bars, and vertical bars to drive multiple sets of silk threads into regular, synchronized movements that simulate the rising and falling rhythms of breath. The core logic of the installation lies in translating abstract

physiological processes into visualized mechanical motions. Through the repetitive rhythm of linear elements, it visually expresses the periodic changes of breathing while exploring the possibilities of merging mechanical structures with biological themes.

05. Breathing: Void

● Design Team: Xiyan Dai, Xinyu Liu, Xiaoyue Yin

● Design Description: Breathing: Void is an interactive installation based on a dynamic opening and closing structure. Centered around the concept of "breathing," it utilizes an Arduino system to control the periodic expansion and contraction of the device, simulating the breathing cycles of a living organism. The main body of the installation is constructed from layered paper materials that display flat, two-dimensional characteristics when closed. As the structure is gradually stretched, continuous rhombic pores form within, transforming the two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional structure with spatial depth. Three breathing units of different scales are suspended on a transparent acrylic interface, moving slowly in a unified rhythm. The combination of flexible paper textures and digital control systems gives the mechanical structure a lifelike sense of breath and fluid movement.

​06. Breath of Bamboo （筠之息） 

● Design Team: Xinlei Dai, Ziqi Gao, Yutong Zhan

● Design Description: This installation focuses on the flexibility and elasticity of bamboo, exploring the relationships between material, mechanics, and rhythm. Bamboo strips are lightweight, flexible, highly resilient, and have a natural texture. Because bamboo fibers align along their length, they offer excellent bending and rebound properties, allowing the structure to breathe naturally between open and closed states. The installation utilizes a stepper motor and a ball screw mechanism to convert rotational motion into vertical linear motion. By driving the central node up and down via a traction line, it triggers the opening, closing, pausing, and retracting of the bamboo structure, forming a rhythmic motion akin to breathing.

07. Origami Breath （折息） 

● Design Team: Yi Yang, Ran Hu, Gan Zhang, Junrui Cheng

● Design Description: This design centers on the theme of "organism respiration," simulating the pace and cadence of life by merging periodic, soothing biological breathing with parametric design. Breathing is not only a biological instinct but also a natural rhythm metaphor for "expansion and contraction, gathering and dispersing." Avoiding literal biomimetic replication, the design uses a mechanical transmission as its skeleton and a folded skin as its carrier. It transforms invisible breathing rhythms into tangible spatial dynamics, achieving a design core of "mechanically interpreting natural rhythms" and bringing the biological concept completely to life.

08. EXHALATION

● Design Team: Ruiyi Chen, Aibike·Kuanisibaike, Chaokai Xu

● Design Description: When breathing no longer belongs to oneself, language no longer belongs to oneself either. This installation represents a near-future AI communication prosthesis—the wearer's breathing is performed by a mechanical device in front of the mouth, exhaling data instead of air. The transmission of color signifies unspoken words being encoded, transmitted, and diffused by AI. People no longer breathe the same air face-to-face; instead, they transmit emotions as cold, precise color signals through their personal AI respirators. The more exquisite the device appears, the further apart human connections become.

09. Ring of Constant Order （恒序之环） 

● Design Team: Junchen Wu, Haozhe Wang, Ziyi Wei

● Design Description: The original intention of this installation is to serve as a conceptual model depicting the "breathing" of the universe. Therefore, rather than mimicking the lung movements of living organisms, it deconstructs "breathing" into a primitive visual language: the alternation between motion and stillness, transmission, condensation, and dispersion. The engagement of the gears represents regular respiration, and each orbit of the satellite wheels marks a pulse beat. The slanting shadows cast by the sun trace the airflow of time, while the journey of the satellite orbits charts the spatial tides. The non-rotatable, fixed rings are not dead matter; they represent the moments of held breath between inhalations and exhalations—order manifests itself within these minute pauses. The machinery delineates the structural framework of universal rhythms, and the gears represent the structural marks left behind by cosmic breathing. When viewers interact with this installation, they are not merely operating a machine; they are sharing a frequency with the universe.

10. Floating Respiration （浮翕） 

● Design Team: Wanling Xing, Changyu Yang, Beilannan Xie, Haoxin Xu

● Design Description: This project extracts the native rhythm of "breathing" and visualizes invisible cycles of opening, closing, rising, and falling. By translating respiration into kinetic movements, it builds a spatial concept where mechanical motion and natural rhythms coexist. The design adapts the rotational motion logic of a popular dynamic morphing hat, moving beyond its original accessory application to reconstruct it into an art installation. Relying on the structural logic of points, lines, and planes, it upgrades a lifestyle structure into an artistic concept. Utilizing dynamic growth as its design language, it converts breathing rhythms into structural movements, endowing the installation with an organic sense of flow.

11. Spectrum of Life （生命波谱） 

● Design Team: Zianduo Luo, Qiman Fei, Enyi Liu, Xiaojing Yan

● Design Description: Using "waves" as a medium, this installation translates physical oscillations into the dynamics of biological breathing. Through transparent materials and tension structures, it presents the invisible yet continuous rhythms and order of life. The cadence of the rhythm—the rising and falling of the waves—corresponds directly to our cycles of inhalation and exhalation, restoring life's most fundamental pace through mechanical dynamics.

12. Deep Sea Pulse （渊息） 

● Design Team: Zihang Ma, Gai Ye, Ruyue Zhang

● Design Description: Breathing is the most fundamental rhythm of energy exchange between life and nature. This kinetic sculpture explores how mechanical physical movements can concretize biological rhythms. Abandoning traditional soft-body deformation, the piece utilizes a rigid, parametric geometric helix as its carrier to construct a central, radiating ecological matrix featuring a "1 primary, 6 secondary" configuration. Through the staggered engagement of a gear array at the base, the installation drives the biomimetic forms above to rotate in reverse at an extremely slow pace. During rotation, the asymmetrical, irregular cross-sections interact with human visual illusions, transforming simple "circular motion" into visual illusions of volume expansion and contraction unique to living organisms. Cold mechanical gears capture a living pulse here, showcasing a serene, vast, and irresistible vitality reminiscent of deep-sea tides.

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