Thursday, August 19, 2010 | Share Article ;)
Materialise was selected to produce trophies for the Moto GP in Sachsenring and Formula 1 race in Budapest. The design was made by Antonio Pio Saracino at the request of Eni, who needed a new interpretation of their traditional six-legged dog logo. Saracino's ethereal design is quite amazing, and of course, impossible to build using normal manufacturing techniques.Thursday, July 29, 2010 | Share Article ;)
There are tens of thousands of new web-based services that do practically everything, from counting kids' allowances to photo editing to managing your sales process. One of them is FloorPlanner, "the easiest way to create floor plans". They provide a simple web interface with drag and drop capability for true ease of use. ;)
The development we noticed was a special option to actually print the floor you've designed - for only USD$129. FloorPlanner has teamed with industry giant Materialise to produce the printed floors, apparently "within 10 days" each.architecture, design in service Saturday, May 15, 2010 | Share Article ;)
In the classic business book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", author Clayton M. Christensen describes a scenario which happens all to often in large companies:Monday, March 22, 2010 | Share Article ;)
On top of time wasted, numerous mistakes resulted because there was no way to efficiently and cost-effectively develop multiple prototypes for the testing of the models. Unseen design errors occurred, which became a serious product development issue. Models did not always match our drawings and development time was extended significantly.
Monday, March 1, 2010 | Share Article ;)
We've been reading a very interesting article by Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign, which discusses the implications of advanced personal manufacturing capabilities on art and design.
Smith explains the basics for those who aren't familiar with modern fabbing, but then goes to review thoughts by several designers, writers and analysts. A key concept we picked up was the notion that design is a relationship between "representation" and "assemblage". In other words, can the design actually be built? Can a vision become reality? In the past the trump card was always held by the assemblage half of the equation. But with today's tools - and we don't just mean the manufacturing devices, we also mean the very advanced software that powers our 3D models - the scales are tipping towards the designer.
As each day passes, equipment is more capable and less expensive, while software becomes more powerful (and sometimes less expensive) and repositories of 3D models and associated assembly paradigms grow vast.
Smith lists several recent exhibitions that attempted to go deep on the fluctuating relationship between representation and assemblage. We're all exploring the new relationship to determine more precisely where it lies. But in the end we expect the line between model and object will get much, much closer. So close that in some situations it won't even matter.
Via Serial Consign
Saturday, January 2, 2010 | Share Article ;)
There's a wonderful article by 3D printing artist Bathsheba Grossman over at Say Something, where she describes her journey from student to world-renowned 3D artist. And the best part: She's now making a living from selling 3D printed art.
But it isn't easy. She spent ten years after completing school to build up the skills in various disciplines (art, mathematics, CAD, etc.) and the experience to build up an art business that today serves as her main source of revenue. We've written of her work several times in the past. Her strategy is direct marketing:
I haven't made much inroad into the traditional art world, but then showing in galleries is not a focus for me. I made a conscious decision about ten years ago to work directly for the viewer – you – rather than try to get the attention of cultural gatekeepers.
What has been the result of her efforts? More than just a job, apparently:
My work has appeared in the New York Times, the London Times and Der Spiegel, as well as Wired, Discover and Make magazines. One of my lamps was in TIME Magazine's 100 most influential designs of 2007. My sculptures have appeared in two hit TV shows, Second Life, and a Japanese videogame commercial. John Conway and Douglas Hofstadter used pictures of them in recent books. They've been shown in Italy, Spain, Korea, New York and Cleveland. An irony-free Wikipedia entry for me was started in 2004. And this site moved over a quarter million dollars of art in 2007, which isn't bad considering I wrote the whole thing by hand, with web skills dating from about 1996.
You can see more of Bathsheba's amazing work at her website.
Via Say Something
Monday, December 28, 2009 | Share Article
Actually it's not the jewelry that's nervous, it's the creators. Or their company: Nervous System. They produce a line of jewelry (bracelets, rings, necklaces, earrings and brooches) that were generated by sophisticated algorithms in software. The designs are then either 3D printed, or in some cases 3D printed moulds are used to create the final objects.
Nervous System uses three different algorithms for much of their product lines: diffusion limited aggregation (which produces eerie coral-ish branching structures); Distortion meshes using a physics simulator (which produces weird twisty meshes that look strangely natural) and Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (which produce similar stretchy meshes, but they're a lot smoother).
Here's the best part: you can actually play with these algorithms yourself using three handy applets on their Tools page.
We're very pleased to see a few things going on here:
Will small designers who employ these advanced techniques demonstrate the future of 21st century businesses? Will this approach grow and overtake conventional techniques? We're watching closely.
Via Nervous System (Hat tip to Jessica)
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 | Share Article 
One of the exhibitors will be the BIOS Collective: "BIOS collective is a working group of academic and professional designers exploring the application of biological patterns to architecture."
We've written about their interesting work before.
According to Charles Lee, Co-Founder & President of the Bios Design Collective:
We are hoping for a close relationship with the 3d community to try to help realize our project. The installation is entitled Coloniatechne and it is our hope that when complete it would be the largest collection of 3d printed panels yet assembled. We have budgeted for the purchase of at least three Reprap machines and hope to have them continuously run in a musuem or gallery setting for most of the next year for the final installation in September. Since we have only won the concept design phase of the project the specifics of the where has not been resolved yet. We want to make the production of the panels open to the whole 3d community in the hopes we can achieve the production of all the "Polyps" we need.
Our project proposes an interpretation of the qualities shared between complex biological systems – like coral – and the collaborative distributed networks found in 21st century human electronic culture. To create our project, we will draw from two open-source communities: one centered around the development of the “Replicating Rapid Prototyper” (RepRap) and one centered around the development of software for an open-source microcontroller (Arduino). With the help of these two communities, and SJ Zero-One, we will create a self-organized, interactive sculpture who’s behavior runs on crowd-sourced algorithms.
Grasshopper, and its companion program Rhino, are both down-loadable as fully functional trial versions, and so are available to anybody with a computer to run them. We will post a base algorithm on our blog, asking people to download and modify it to create their own versions. We will print their designs on our machines, or encourage them to print their own when possible, and drop them off. As our collection of polyps grows throughout the summer, we will add them to the base structure.
design, exhibition 
Feed URL
Twitter
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our Feed