Hasta La Ideas

Text & photos by Francis Bitonti Studio

See Part 1 here

The second week of Francis Bitonti‘s New Skins: Computational Design for Fashion workshop saw a week-long charrette at Pratt Institute’s Digital Arts and Humanities Research Center. This intensive design/prototyping phase of the three-week course culminated with a presentation to a panel of critics including architect and designer Vito Acconci, mononymic fashion designer Jona from INAISCE, and representatives from MakerBot.

Leading up to the review, the students worked in four teams of three to produce their designs in a digital environment. Each team also produced prototypes of a 3D-printed textile, printed on the MakerBot Replicator 2, which is part and parcel to their proposals for their final projects. “The MakerBot gives the designers immediate feedback between the digital and the physical world,” Bitonti noted. “With all the complexity we are able to generate in the digital environment, it’s important to have immediate material feedback so that the students can start push the geometry towards cultivating interesting material behaviors.”

The workshop is about finding the new aesthetic formal language of this new manufacturing paradigm. It was essential that the students work directly with rapid prototyping equipment. The materials are different they are built different, the students need to be working intelligently with the materials and build procedure. We are working with these materials as end use parts it’s not just about replicating a form from the computer, though that is part of it—it’s about cultivating new material behaviors.

The makerware software has proven to be extremely valuable in fine tuning the material output. The final design the students produce will be entirely printed on MakerBot 3D printers.

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