3D Printing a Living Object: Furniture

Designer Eric Klarenbeek has used 3D printing in a revolutionary way we’ve not seen before: printing a living piece of furniture.    The Dutch designer 3D printed a chair (with an amazing design) from straw material (not seen before) and added living fungus (also not seen before).    The “Mycelium Chair” includes a very thin… Continue reading 3D Printing a Living Object: Furniture

Furniture That Can Carry Its Own Weight

Multithread, a furniture collection that is currently on display at the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial, has an interesting story behind its creation.   Designed by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, the Multithread collection was built using custom-created CAD software that can analyze the support forces acting on a piece of furniture’s joints and modify the… Continue reading Furniture That Can Carry Its Own Weight

Design of the Week: The Bloom Table Lamp

This week’s selected design is Patrick Jouin’s incredible Bloom table lamp. What makes it so interesting? It’s based on the mechanics of an actual flower: to emit more light, the lampshade opens as a flower does when exposed to light.    The piece is actually 3D printed as a single unit, including hinges for the… Continue reading Design of the Week: The Bloom Table Lamp

Self Powered 3D Printed Lamp

Designer Margot Krasojevic has developed a very unique piece: a 3D printed light that provides its own power. How does it do that, exactly?    The shape of the case is the secret. While it appears to be an attractive lamp, aerodynamically its actually a propeller! It’s mounted on a rotating axis connected to a… Continue reading Self Powered 3D Printed Lamp

The Endless Chair

Another surprise item seen at London’s Design Museum was the “Endless Chair”. Why is it called “endless”? Because it’s made from recycled refrigerators, where plastic is ground up and extruded in 3D printing fashion into the correct chair shape.    Another reason for the name is that the production equipment, in this case a leftover… Continue reading The Endless Chair

Natural 3D Printing

Ponoko posted of a wonderful story about Sydney-based lighting company SandFlora’s experience designing a beautiful lamp. The interesting part was the inspiration: nature. In fact, this line of lamp was inspired by the intricate Waratah flower, native to Australia.     The lamp was of course 3D printed and looks amazing.    Our interest, as was… Continue reading Natural 3D Printing

3D Printed Chairs

Freedom of Creation has produced another set of amazing furniture, this time by Dutch designer Bram Geenen. The design of the Gaudi stool (pictured) and a matching chair was done mathematically, where the curves and internal structure were determined by the distribution of various forces. From design, the furniture was produced by laser sintering. These… Continue reading 3D Printed Chairs

Fractal Tree Table

If the size of your 3D printer’s build chamber is too small, the answer is obvious: break your object into a series of smaller parts, print and assemble them. That or buying a bigger printer.    But let’s turn this around: what if you don’t know how big your object is, and you just print… Continue reading Fractal Tree Table

Images From DHUB

There’s a fascinating exhibition taking place at the Disseny Hub in Barcelona, also known as “DHUB”. From the exhibition’s description:   FABRICATION LABORATORY consists of not one but a series of activities (exhibitions, real-time fabrication laboratories, workshops, lectures, etc.) that offer a comprehensive overview of 3D digital manufacturing technologies.   Flickr user LaN_Luis has published… Continue reading Images From DHUB

SMArchitecture

We ran across a very interesting operation: SMArchitecture, a “Kuwait and London based architectural & design R&D practice”. Their blog, written by Dr. Thomas Modeen describes their design experiments, which are often highly unusual and seem to have evolved from fabrication techniques. Some examples:   The ‘Comet’ vase, which consists of a bundle of hollow,… Continue reading SMArchitecture

Chairs You Can Sit On

Some may say that 3D printed items are not robust, but not this time. Design firm Freedom of Creation’s Janne Kyttanen has made an amazing set of swivel chairs exclusively for a yacht and residence. FOC used Selective Laser Sintering to produce the unique chairs, which are based on a previous tray design. The chair… Continue reading Chairs You Can Sit On

The .MGX Collection

Earlier this week we encountered iMaterialise’s .MGX collection at the Parallellepipeda Exhibition, and we wanted to learn more. iMaterialise, as we’ve written before, is one of the notable and larger 3D print services today. Like most 3D print services, they allow you to upload your own 3D design (and even help you do it successfully)… Continue reading The .MGX Collection

The Parallellipipeda Exhibition

The Singularity Hub reports on an exhibition taking place at the M Museum in Leuven, Belgium, where the Parallellipipeda Project attempts to leverage the Parallelepiped geometric shape.    Amazing sculptures, plates, light fixtures and even furniture are being shown until 25 April. They’ve even included a 3D scanning booth, courtesy of EyeTronics, in which you… Continue reading The Parallellipipeda Exhibition

Punched Lamps

  Sometimes when we visit the furniture store it gets frustrating, items are too expensive or they don’t have precisely what you want. We’ve seen a bit of this before, but now emerges a new approach to furniture making: punch out the design yourself, literally! Fluid Forms now offers personally designed 3D prints of lampshades.… Continue reading Punched Lamps

Sketch Furniture Into Reality

Swedish design firm FRONT is pioneering a rather unusual method of developing 3D furniture models. They use 3D motion capture techniques to trace the movement of a sketch artist’s pen in three dimensions. The sketch artist, in this case, is drawing life-size furniture in empty space. Once you have a 3D model, what might you… Continue reading Sketch Furniture Into Reality

Dining Room Table Printed

  It’s really just a model, but the concept was developed by Swiss Designer Phillippe Cramer. Interestingly, Philippe’s model is entitled, “Stalactite Table”, which mirrors the 3D printing process that produced it: layer by layer.  Maybe when the build chambers of commonly available 3D printers are a bit bigger than they are now (12 inches… Continue reading Dining Room Table Printed

3D Sneeze in your Living Room

Marcel Wanders, a dutch designer, has created a very unusual vase. It’s based on a 3D scan of an “airborne snotty”. The picture tells the story. Via Marcel Wanders Studio