3D-print-happy designer Michiel Cornelissen is at it again. To create his clever ZooM lampshade, Cornelissen has adopted the trick we first saw Sklyar Tibbits messing around with, where you print something small and made out of interlocking pieces that can then be stretched out to occupy a greater volume. In this case, gravity does the work for you.
Created as a programmable object in generative design software, ZooM has a structure created from hundreds of repeating elements that together form a series of interlocking spirals.
3-d printing allows this pentagonal lampshade to be manufactured flat and completely assembled; folded out, it’s flexible like a textile, while maintaining its form like a rigid product. The semi-transparent structure shields the bulb’s glare, while transmitting light efficiently.
Cornelissen is selling them in two sizes, a 20-cm and 28-cm version. And as cool as it looks in blue, at press time it was only available in black or white.
Polypropylene is one of your go-to plastics for injection molding, and being both flexible and tough, you can do sexy things like making living hinges out of the stuff. But you are of course limited to what you can produce in a mold.
Stratasys is hoping to remove this barrier with Endur, a simulated polypropylene material that can be 3D-printed in their PolyJet machines.
Just like the name implies, Endur is tough. The polypropylene-like material offers both high impact resistance and superior elongation at break. Endur has a heat-deflection temperature up to 129°F/ 54°C, excellent dimensional stability and comes in a bright white color. It also features an excellent surface finish to make it easier to achieve a smooth look and feel.
These properties make Endur attractive for 3D printing prototypes that need the flexibility, appearance and toughness of polypropylene for a wide range of form, fit and assembly applications. This includes moving parts, snap-fit components, and small cases and containers with lids. The white tone and smooth surface finish make it ideal for consumer goods, electronics and household appliances, lab equipment and automotive parts.
Take a look at the stuff in this amusingly stilted video:
Following the success of their first New Skins: Computational Design for Fashion workshop, Francis Bitonti Studio recently partnered with Makerbot and Lagoa for a second session this winter. Hosted at the Metropolitan Exchange in Brooklyn, the New Skins Workshop: Brumal Bodies took place over ten days this January, including an introduction to computational design followed by a hands-on workshop. Using programs such as Maya and Rhino, students worked together designing garments, which were then rendered in Lagoa, a browser-based, hyper-realistic rendering software, as well as experimenting with the Makerbot Replicator 2 3D printer, with their efforts culminating in a collaboratively designed 3D-printed final project: the Bristle Dress.
The ‘Bristle Dress’ started by exploring different ways and techniques to create volume. The workshop focused on dissolving the silhouette of the body into the atmosphere, with the aim to create a trasitional garment. The upper part of the dress was designed to be printed in the naturally colored (clear) PLA, a material selected for its translucent qualities—specifically, the way it refracted the light greatly helped us achieve our design objectives. The skirt was created using Makerbot’s flexible filament material and was lined with synthetic rabbit fur. The result is a flexible yet highly structured garment: 3D printing the skirt allowed us to create an interesting interface, while the texture of the fur lining further aided in the creation of our overall silhouette, combining both artificial and natural textures. This multi-material relationship has been an emerging area of interest for the studio for some time now. The skirt portion of the dress is customizable and is available for download at Thingiverse.com.
You heard it here first: “3D printing is having its ‘Macintosh moment.'” So says the team behind a new full-length documentary on the subject, directors Luis Lopez and Clay Tweel and producer Steven Klein. Hollywood Reporter fills in the blank: Pettis is the Steve Jobs of the movement, a shorthand for an upstart who will bring us a product that we never knew we needed through sheer force of will. (Meanwhile, the colossal quarter that he has rendered for the website and poster features his face instead of one of our founding fathers, casting Jobs as none other than God.)
Print the Legend will premiere at SXSW Film Festival this weekend with a handful of screenings in Austin, and if the forthcoming dates are TBD, at least the press materials include a selective history of 3D printing. Between the trailer and milestones listed below, it looks like there’s definitely a narrative arc to the documentary…
Once upon a time bicycles were made from tube stock. These days it seems they may go 3D-printed. But until they get there, there are guys like California-based Brent Foes, whose Foes Racing USA company uses a hybrid of old and new technologies, like having a waterjet cut aluminum sheets into components that are then hydraulic-pressed and welded to create incredibly strong bike frames.
Growing up, you couldn’t get cooler or more stylish than wearing something you created yourself. Proof: I had a short run as a seamstress of sorts after my high school peers saw the pair of ripped denim I brought back to life with a few obnoxiously bright scraps of fabric. It fizzled quickly—self admittedly, I couldn’t sew a straight line then and still can’t—and so did the DIY fashion trend as we moved on from Friday night football games and prom. Suddenly hot off the runway knock-offs became choice over scrapping together a completely unique statement shirt. OpenKnit is keeping the DIY spirit alive and well, with a very design-savvy production method, of course. While the machine’s finished garments may lack a certain je ne sais quoi when it compares to the ready-to-wear market, the style is all in the production method—which is the kind of thing we get excited about.
OpenKnit is a an open-source digital fabrication machine that creates garments on-demand from a mess of yarn to finished sweater. Better yet, it’s pretty quick to do so—said sweater can reportedly be completed within an hour. The machine is powered by Knitic (which we previously covered here), making it possible—and easy—for users to design their personalized pattern and feed it into the printer. More on OpenKnit from its website:
About nine months ago, we got a first look at a freely articulating 3D printer, developed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). By extruding a special fast-curing resin with a multi-jointed robotic arm, MATAERIAL proposed a “radically new 3D printing method,” suitable for “irregular or non-horizontal surfaces.” Now, the Dutch designer has unveiled his latest breakthrough in liberating digital fabrication from a build platform: As its name suggests, MX3D-Metal can print lines of steel, stainless steel, aluminum, bronze or copper “in mid-air.”
The MX3D-Metal reportedly debuted at last week’s Fabricate2014 conference and will make its way to New York City’s Friedman Benda gallery come May. Laarman shared some more information on his approach and what’s next for the team.
Our Amsterdam-based lab is an experimental playground that tinkers with engineers and craftsmen on the many new possibilities of emerging technology in the field of art and design. We usually start working on projects based on the concept “what if…?” after which we start figuring out how we could hack or combine certain technologies to make something new. Usually, this results in a new series of design pieces with a form language; and this arises out of the new possibilities of the new technology. We believe we tackle technological challenges very differently than others by using a hands-on approach to create such design objects.
Over the years, our lab has worked this way together with many inspiring people in the field of digital fabrication and computational design. We’ve worked with professionals and students from institutes like MIT, IAAC, ETH and the Architectural Association to develop new concepts for the digital fabrication revolution. For some time now, we’ve held two research positions at our lab. The purpose of this role is pure experimentation with digital fabrication under our supervision—and with the help of craftsmen and software and robotic engineers. Recently, the technical side of our work at the lab is supported by Autodesk. The reason for this is so we don’t just end up with a new series of design objects; it’s so we can bring technology to a higher level.
We’ve seen 3D-printed bike parts before, but now two British firms have advanced into printing out the entire frame (albeit not in a single piece, presumably because no laser sintering machine yet has that kind of footprint). Additive manufacturing firm Renishaw has joined forces with Empire Cycles to create a one-off version of Empire’s MX6-EVO, which typically comes in aluminum; the one-off, however, was done with titanium alloy, and the duo reckon this is the world’s first to be 3D-printed.
To broaden your newly Google-supported Lego fantasies, check out this tool to take designs from your computer into the real world. The recent project out of the Hasso Plattner Institute offers a fun and arguably obvious workaround to make rapid prototyping more, y’know, rapid. Their “FaBrickation” program lets you save the 3D printing for only the most vital high-res parts and convert the rest of your design to Legos from the get-go.
We’ve been fans of Richard Clarkson‘s work since he was a dewy-eyed student at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design—which admittedly was not all that long ago—where he developed projects from the steampunk smartphone to a heady algorithmic chair. Now in his final term at SVA in New York City, Clarkson is a world away from his native New Zealand, yet he is more committed to his craft than ever as he looks forward to completing his MFA amongst the very first graduating class of the Products of Design program.
May 2014 will also mark the two-year anniversary of a project from his Victoria days, which was only recently cleared for publication (more on that below). Working with supervisor Tim Miller, Clarkson took the class on “Creative Digital Manufacturing” as an opportunity to experiment with revolutionary new 3D printing technology—and even though he completed the project over a year and a half ago, he notes that “Blossom” may well be “the world’s first inflatable 3D print.”
The heart of the design is a mixed material—thanks to a breakthrough in “simultaneous deposition of different build materials in a single print”—that can be rigid and flexible in different regions across its form. “[As in] nature, materials can be distributed seamlessly within objects for structural and functional advantage… The variation offers an opportunity to generate complex forms and dynamic structures that are impossible to make by any other means.”
While the video above nicely illustrates the final results, Clarkson shared more about the process—including why he’s just gotten around to publishing—and more details about just how he achieved his breakthrough.
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