Oakland-based designer and inventor Alex Schofield focuses on emerging technologies, material research, and their implications within the built environment. He completed his M.Arch at University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Mario Ciampi Art in Architecture Award for invention of an architecture built from reused coffee grounds. Alex Schofield began his career as a Researcher at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design in development of the printFARM (Print Facility for Architecture, Research, and Materials) and various 3D printed methods and materials. He has worked for innovative materials and technology-based design firm Emerging Objects as well as the environmentally focused Hyphae Design Laboratory. He has since completed residencies at both Autodesk Pier 9 and Workshop Residence in San Francisco, and has lectured and exhibited his work abroad. Alex also teaches at California College of the Arts, where he is an adjunct professor of Architecture and collaborator with the Architectural Ecologies Lab and Digital Craft Lab.
With a background in architecture and a combined interest of emerging technologies, Alex noticed opportunity to apply lessons learned from the scale of a building to that of a product. Manufacturing, through access to CNC technology and IoT, has radically altered how things are made – today small designers and makers can act like factories through efficiencies in automation and interconnected design platforms. Currently Alex Schofield operates by applying these lessons through design and development of craftOS, a web-based design for manufacturing application that helps automate order to fulfillment within a variety of product sectors.
See Alexander in: TH98: The Digital Twin and the Factory of the Future, Today