Our creativity has no limits.

Interior design professor Linda Zhang led research project to completion despite obstacles posed during COVID-19

By Michelle Grady | June 9, 2021

A series of images depict aspects of research using robotic arm, terracota panels and zoom meetings

A series of images illustrate the process of interior design professor Linda Zhang and her research team as they worked virtually with the robot in the Creative Technology Lab.

Linda Zhang, a professor in the School of Interior Design, hasn’t let the pandemic stop her or her research team – despite the fact that her work involves robots and cross-border collaboration. Before the pandemic, Zhang and her team, including Ryerson research students, intended to take their work to the Architectural Ceramics Assemblies Workshop (ACAW) in Buffalo in August 2020. When the border was closed and labs became inaccessible, the team had to rethink the way they were working in order to deliver by the deadline.

“Our project team is very interdisciplinary and is located around North America. We were ramping up to do several in-person intensives over the summer that would lead to the final research and prototypes that we would bring to this workshop,” says Zhang. “We were looking at how to integrate robotics into the ceramic industrial manufacturing process and researching what advantages that could bring, in terms of design or craft, to their existing processes … and then COVID hit.”

A researcher works on the project using the robot in the Creative Technology Lab.

Zhang says her team was lucky because, just prior to the shut down, they’d been to visit Boston Valley Terra Cotta, their industry partner in Buffalo, NY, which is a global leader in the manufacturing of custom architectural terracotta for restoration, and had collected two tonnes of terracotta facade panels that had been extruded from the factory. Normally, the team used the terracotta panels to experiment with robotic post-extrusion processes in Ryerson’s Creative Technology Lab to see how it could be used to advance architectural ceramic manufacturing.

“The lab was very supportive and loaned everyone on the team 3D printers, and we sent everyone home with some of the clay,” says Zhang. “So we were experimenting with 3D printing to try to mimic what the robot could do and using it to test other questions as best as we could on Zoom. The Faculty of Communication and Design provided the student researchers with laptops and software, which allowed them to program and simulate robotic movements virtually at home.”

Collaboration on the project continued via Zoom.

The team was approved to get back into the Creative Technology Lab in mid-June 2020. When everyone wasn’t able to come in person due to border closures, they continued to use Zoom with a laptop set up just for the robot. This continued research meant the team was able to participate in the conference workshop as scheduled. “It was a cluster of people making things in different cities, which was kind of hilarious and amazing,” says Zhang.

Zhang and her team also set up a series of presentations with a VR gallery exhibit space. “We did a presentation where there was a discussion, then everyone’s work was presented in this virtual space where you could have the virtual experience of walking closer to the piece and seeing it at a distance.” Zhang says though she has done many physical exhibitions in the past, putting together a parallel VR of a physical exhibition was new to her, but it’s something she would like to incorporate into every show post-COVID.

(Top & Bottom) Images from the virtual reality gallery exhibit space. The researchers used terracotta panels to experiment with robotic post-extrusion processes in Ryerson’s Creative Technology Lab to see how it could be used to advance architectural ceramic manufacturing.