Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

No one understands the barriers and possibilities of a digitally manufactured future better than those engineers who control the practical aspects of design and manufacturing. Yet, artists and industrial designers can provide some insight into additive fabrication too.

Paola Antonelli, the senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art's dept. of architecture and design, points out designers have been keenly interested in additive fabrication for about five years now. “The good designers understand what these technologies can and cannot do,” she says.

And judging from a new exhibit at the MoMA, designers understand additive fabrication machines can do things engineers haven't quite dreamed of yet.

The exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind, explores the often reciprocal relationship between science and design. And Antonelli filled the exhibit with objects and concepts that highlight what she considers disruptive or potentially disruptive technologies. Though the exhibit divvies them up differently than Design News' readers would, these technologies include nanotech, computer-aided design, advanced actuators, biomimicry, robotics, motion control and 3D printing.

Just as we often do here at Design News, Antonelli uses “3D printing” as a catch-all term for all the computer-driven, additive fabrication systems, not just the few machines that actually use ink-jet deposition methods. And she picked some interesting objects to show what these technologies can do.

One 3-D printing standout was the “sketch furniture,” from Front Design. This Swedish design group has come up with a system for “materializing free-hand sketches,” by combining video motion capture techniques and additive fabrication. Users simply make full-scale gestures in the air to sketch out the object — think of the gestures as pen strokes. The motion capture technology records these gestures, saving them as 3-D part data, which can then drive a laser sintering machine. The exhibit showed furniture Front has produced with the system. But engineers may well look at the system and see the whiteboard of their dreams.

Another interesting exhibit showed the capability of 3-D printing to create textiles. Usually we think of additive technologies as producing rigid parts or sometimes assemblies of parts that can move in relation to one another. Freedom of Creation, a Netherlands design group, has used EOS laser sintering technology to create textiles. These textiles have their “threads” interwoven layer-by-layer during the sintering process. Computer design allows the textile to take on a wide variety of properties, something that may interest engineers responsible for flexible goods.

Design for the Elastic Mind features many other examples of 3D printing, from production automotive parts to chairs that push the build envelope of these machines.