by Fabio Gramazio
While, as a technical and intellectual precondition to digital fabrication, parametric design manifests itself throughout Gramazio Kohler’s work, one early project, called mTable, where the “m” stands for mobile phone, particularly stages the newly defined relationship between author and design in the era of parametric freedom and digital production. The lecture revisits this seminal experiment with 15 years distance and discusses the actuality of the themes and theses it picked up. mTable directly addressed mass customization and the end user as its object of investigation, but the question of where authorship manifests itself in contemporary digital design practice and how this relates to the alleged openness and, in the terms of this symposium, democratization of design is key to many more recent architectural projects and academic research works by Gramazio Kohler.