Hasta La Ideas

This collection of 3D-printed jewellery by Royal College of Art student Dorry Hsu was inspired by the designer’s own fear of insects.

Dorry Hsu 3D-printed The Aesthetic of Fears collection in clear resin using stereolithography (SLA) before attaching latex straps.

She then coloured each piece by dipping it into boiling dye, adding one hue at a time.

The forms of the jewellery are based on insects with lots of legs.

“My collection is about the aesthetic and the attraction of fears,” she explained. “In many cultures people wear masks to scare evil away, so the masks are decorated with frightening images from the wearer’s own fears.”

“I recorded and wrote down my fears in 40 days, and the bug with many legs was one of the fearful objects on my list,” she told Dezeen.

To create the 3D files to be printed, Hsu used a tool called a haptic arm that allowed her to draw the shapes as though sculpting in clay.

“It’s a way of drawing in 3D, like building up clay in a computer program,” she explained. “The haptic arm functions as a computer mouse and you can feel the tension of dragging clay.”

“It’s more like hand-drawing or hand-building clay and is really different to traditional computer drawing like Rhino,” she added.

Dorry Hsu is studying an MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery at the Royal College of Art in London and developed the project with the college’s RapidformRCA digital design, prototyping and manufacturing department.

She was one of four finalists in the International Talent Support awards last month.

Other 3D-printed fashion on Dezeen includes jewellery made up of ball-and-socket joints, 3D-printed sunglasses by Ron Arad and sculptural pieces by Iris van Herpen.

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by Dorry Hsu appeared first on Dezeen.

News: printing and packaging retailer The UPS Store has launched an in-store 3D printing service in six shops across the USA.

Stratasys, a leading manufacturer of 3D printers and production systems, has announced today that it is providing its 3D printing technology to The UPS Store, a subsidiary of United Parcel Service (UPS) of America that provides printing services and packaging materials in over 4700 shops in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada.

“The project is part of a test program by The UPS Store that will make it the first national retailer in the US to offer 3D printing service to entrepreneurs, architects, start-ups and other retail customers,” Stratasys said.

As part of their pilot, The UPS Store will install Stratasys’ uPrint SE Plus printers into six locations, starting in San Diego. Customers will be able to bring a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file in to the participating stores and have their designs 3D-printed on-site.

“The UPS Store and Stratasys share the vision of strengthening innovation and competitiveness by making 3D printing accessible to a growing number of users,” said Stratasys Executive Vice President, Jon Cobb.

This news comes only a month after UK electronics retailer Maplin became the first UK chain to sell a 3D printer aimed at the domestic market. In other news, NASA has approved the first 3D printer for use in space, which will be flown to the International Space Station [ISS] next year.

You can read more about the way 3D printing is changing the worlds of architecture, design, food and medicine in Print Shift, our one-off print-on-demand magazine all about additive manufacturing.

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Image is by Stratasys.

Here’s the press release from Stratasys:

Stratasys to provide 3D printers to The UPS Store for new retail 3D printing service

Stratasys uPrint SE Plus systems will be used in pilot program.

Stratasys, a leading manufacturer of 3D printers and production systems, today announced that it has been selected by The UPS Store to provide its 3D printing systems to The UPS Store as part of a test program that will make it the first national retailer in the U.S. to offer 3D printing service to entrepreneurs, architects, start-ups and other retail customers. This service will enable UPS Store customers to have their 3D design 3D printed on-site.

The test signals a collaborative effort by Stratasys and The UPS Store to make 3D printing accessible to small businesses as awareness of the technology and its capabilities grows. Stratasys 3D Printers can create on-demand, custom objects of virtually any complexity in a fast and simple process.

“3D printing technology is becoming increasingly accessible to a growing number of companies and consumers. Small businesses are beginning to realise how this revolutionary technology can help them to be more competitive,” said Stratasys Executive Vice President, Jon Cobb.

“The UPS Store and Stratasys share the vision of strengthening innovation and competitiveness by making 3D printing accessible to a growing number of users.”

While the program is aimed at small businesses, it is open to anyone interested in trying out on-site 3D printing services. “After doing a lot of research, we went with the Stratasys uPrint, because it has a small footprint and is easy to operate,” said The UPS Store small business technology leader, Daniel Remba.

Following the launch of the test, retail customers will be able to bring a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file to participating UPS Store locations and have their 3D design printed on-site.

The UPS Store is installing Stratasys uPrint SE Plus 3D Printers in six test locations, beginning in San Diego.

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to offer 3D printing service appeared first on Dezeen.

News: a research team in Zürich has created a flock of helicopter robots that can detect each others’ positions and join together to create a larger flying machine.

The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) has been developed by a team of researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC) at ETH Zürich university in Switzerland.

Each robot has a 3D-printed hexagonal plastic chassis with magnets fixed to the sides of the frame and a single propeller fitted in the middle.

Independently, the honeycomb-shaped robots fly in an erratic and uncontrolled way. However, the robots are able to detect each other, link to form a bigger craft and then fly in a controlled manner as a single unit. The task of keeping the multi-propeller system in flight is distributed across the network of vehicles.

Each independent module exchanges information with the others and uses sensors to determine how much thrust it needs for the array to take off and maintain flight.

“The Distributed Flight Array is a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous single propeller vehicles that are able to drive, dock with their peers and fly in a coordinated fashion,” explains the IDSC. “Once in flight the array hovers for a few minutes, then falls back to the ground, only to repeat the cycle again.”

Watch a video of the DFA system in action here:

“If the array’s levelled flight is disturbed, each vehicle individually determines the amount of thrust required to correct for the disturbance based on its position in the array and the array’s motion,” IDSC said.

The project has been developed for two reasons, Maximilian Kriegleder from the IDSC told Dezeen: as a research platform for distributed control and estimation, and as an artistic installation that could illustrate such control of robots to members of the public.

“The platform currently flies with either joystick input from an user or input from an external sensor system such as GPS. We are trying to close this gap and make the system completely self-contained and autonomous so that no external input is needed,” Kriegleder told Dezeen.

Although the project was not designed for a specific purpose, Kriegleder suggests that the technology could be used for transportation systems. “The developed algorithms apply to any real systems that needs to be scalable and distributed,” Kriegleder told Dezeen. “One specific example could be a scalable mass transportation system, where one only adds so many modules that a certain payload could be lifted.”

The DFA project was launched in 2008 as a postgraduate class at ETH Zürich university and is being continued by Dr. Raymond Oung as his PhD project.

Here’s a film showing the concept behind the flying system:

Photographs are by Dr. Raymond Oung.

Other flying machines we’re featured on Dezeen include a tiny robotic insect the size of a small coin that hovers in the air like a fly and a human-powered helicopter that won a 33-year-old aviation prize, after hovering for 64 seconds and reaching an altitude of 3.3 metres.

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drones capable of self-assembly appeared first on Dezeen.

News: police in Germany plan to 3D print a gun to test whether the weapon can pass through security checks undetected.

According to a report on GigaOM, police officers have bought a 3D printer and will also explore whether printed weapons could be used by the police themselves.

The news emerged in response to a question posed in parliament by Die Linke (The Left Party), the technology website reported.

“The government said the police wanted to see whether ne’er-do-wells could actually make plastic guns that could be smuggled onto planes, and also whether the police might find a use for such technology themselves,” GigaOM said.

The news follows reports that Australian police downloaded and 3D printed their own handgun earlier this year, using materials worth $35. Officers in the Australian state of New South Wales found that the gun fired a bullet 17 centimetres into a standard firing block, but it exploded when it was discharged.

New South Wales police commissioner Andrew Scipione made the announcement at a press conference on 24 May and warned the public about the threat posed by 3D printed weaponry.

“Make no mistake, not only are these things undetectable, untraceable, cheap and easy to make, but they will kill,” said Scipione at the time. Here’s the full speech:

3D printed guns have been making headlines since May 2013, when Cody Wilson, founder of Texas-based Defence Distributed made the CAD designs of a 3D printable handgun available online. The blueprints for the gun, called Liberator, were downloaded over 100,000 times in the two days after they were uploaded to the organisation’s website.

Two days after the first 3D printed plastic gun was successfully fired in Texas, the US Department of Defense Trade Controls removed the files from online public access.

In October last year, open-source design expert Ronen Kadushin warned Dezeen that affordable 3D printers could one day “print ammunition for an army”. He added: “This is a very, very dangerous situation.”

Dezeen has reported on the rise of 3D-printed weaponry in our print-on-demand publication Print Shift, which also looks at how the technology is being adapted to architecture, design, food, fashion and other fields.

See all our stories about 3D printing »

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Los Angeles architects Kyle and Liz von Hasseln have set up a business that produces 3D-printed sugar sculptures for wedding cakes, table centrepieces and pie toppings.

The duo founded 3D printing company The Sugar Lab while studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where they graduated last autumn.

Their sugar sculptures are made using a process similar to standard 3D printing: a mixture of alcohol and water is applied selectively in layers to wet and then harden the sugar.

“If you’ve ever made frosting and left the mixing bowl in the sink overnight, you know that moistened sugar gets quite hard,” said the designers. “That’s the underlying concept of 3D printing with sugar.”

The resulting pieces taste like normal sugar, but could be flavoured. The pair are working on a range of custom projects including cake toppers, centrepieces, pie-crust lattices and a four-tiered wedding cake with a 3D-printed sugar stand.

“That’s an exciting part of 3D printing sugar for us – transforming sugar into a structural, sculptural medium that can start to define the form of the food instead of the other way around, and even to support it structurally,” the designers added.

“We see 3D-printed sugar as the best place to start, in terms of 3D printing food,” they continued. “There’s an existing cultural ritual of desert and celebration that embraces experimentation and embellishment. It’s primed to embrace technology like 3D printing as a design tool, and we’re just tapping into that.”

Other sugar design projects on Dezeen include a patterned dance floor of sieved icing sugar, a machine for automatically decorating cakes and jewellery grown on threads suspended in sugar solution.

Other unusual food we’ve featured recently includes bio-engineered dishes that wriggle around on the plate, yoghurts, ice creams and cheeses with edible packaging and fruit labelled with laser tattoos instead of stickers.

We’ve also featured 3D-printed models of cereal, pasta and hamburgers, and you can read more about when we can expect to tuck into 3D-printed steaks in an extract from Print Shift, our one-off print-on-demand magazine all about additive manufacturing.

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Here’s some more information from The Sugar Lab:

What we do

The Sugar Lab is a micro-design firm for custom 3D printed sugar. With our background in architecture and our penchant for complex geometry, we’re bringing 3D printing technology to the genre of mega-cool cakes. 3D printing represents a paradigm shift for confections, transforming sugar into an dimensional, structural medium. It makes it possible to design, digitally model
and print an utterly original sugar sculpture on top of a cake.

All of our projects are custom. The design process begins from scratch, when we hear from you. Tell us your idea/theme/vibe. Give us a swatch of lace from your gown/a polaroid of the wrought iron gate at your venue/a postcard of your hometown skyline. Or just come to The Sugar Lab and brainstorm with us. It doesn’t even have to be a cake; centerpieces, chandeliers, cupcake toppers, sugar cubes, pie-crust-lattice, grapefruit sweeteners, all possible and possibly awesome.

How we got started We’re Kyle and Liz von Hasseln, a husband and wife architectural design team in Los Angeles. The Sugar Lab started about two years ago, when we were graduate students in architecture. We were living in a tiny apartment in Echo Park with a correspondingly tiny outdoor kitchen. We didn’t have an oven, and when we realized that meant we couldn’t bake our friend Chelsea a cake for her birthday, we decided to try to 3D print one, instead.

After a period of trial and error (during which her actual birthday came and went!) we managed to print a simple cupcake topper that spelled out ‘Chelsea’ in cursive sugar. Chelsea loved it! We thought other people might like 3D printed sugar, too, so when we graduated last fall, we spent the time to really optimize our process, and we started The Sugar Lab–officially–in our new studio here in Silver Lake.

Our process

After some brainstorming and messy hand sketching, we work to translate our ideas into 3D digital models. Our backgrounds in architecture serve us well during the modeling process, which has a lot to do with structural and material considerations as well as making design moves. We’re always aiming for a sculptural, dimensional form that maximizes what 3D printing brings to sugar.

As for the actual printing process, if you’ve ever made frosting and left the mixing bowl in the sink overnight, you know that moistened sugar gets quite hard. That’s the underlying concept of 3D printing with sugar. We use a mixture of water and alcohol, applied very precisely in a layer-wise manner, to selectively wet and harden the sugar substrate. The process is fundamentally similar to other 3D printing applications, we’ve just optimized the process for resolution and strength with sugar, rather than with a standard 3D printing material.

What’s so cool about 3d=printed sugar?

3D printing transforms sugar into a structural, sculptural element that can interact with food on different terms. 3D printed sugar can be used to sweeten or to ornament, but it can also start to define the form of the food instead of the other way around, or even to support it structurally. For example, we’re very excited to be working right now with some seriously talented cake artists at a well-known bakery in Hollywood to design a four-tiered wedding cake with a 3D printed sugar cake-stand, and 3D printed sugar-tiers supporting traditional cake tiers. What’s exciting for us is, in terms of the possibilities of 3D printed sugar, is how differently everyone thinks about how to use it. People are constantly suggesting things we’ve never thought of, and it’s very fun to try to implement those ideas.

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Kyle and Liz von Hasseln appeared first on Dezeen.