FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

There’s one more reason for going to Barcelona these months: Full Print3d. Printing Objects, an exhibition about 3D Printing in the Disseny Hub Barcelona. Unfortunately I had no time to blog it before, but the exhibition is from 16.06.2010 to 29.05.2011, so there’s still time to visit it.
All of the objects presented at Full Print3d were created using different additive manufacturing processes and are organize into six thematic areas: freeform, variation, customization, complexity, materiality, and finally, applications and research. Some examples are products from Fluid Forms, Freedom of Creation and Nervous System.

The exhibition was curated by Marta Malé–Alemany, architect and co-director of the Masters Program at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) (where I gave a lecture one year ago).
I collaborated with Marta for the exhibition (that’s why I’m in the credits), and my little help was mainly about researching the strategic applications of 3D printing with a broader perspective: I’m not interested in the technology details so much, but more in how these technologies can be used for developing Open Design projects and in general, Open and Complex projects.

Marta Malé-Alemany talking about the exhibition (in Catalan):

Full Print3d. Imprimint objectes from DHUB on Vimeo.

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In this post I’d like to suggest you a Creative Commons-licensed reading, to announce you an event I’m going to participate to and start an open discussion about their common subject: what will probably be the future of Industrial Design and Manufacturing, and how we can draw a map of it?

First, I suggest you reading this publication, Future of Making Map, published by Institute for the Future here: http://iftf.org/node/1766.

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences— the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

[...]

There is much to be learned from the maker mindset of collaboration, creativity, and open access. Yet the maker culture will not replace traditional industry. In the future, traditional manufacturers and maverick makers will be closely linked— sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but frequently blurring the boundaries that separate them. Success will occur when the two cultures are woven together in new and interesting ways.

via | core77

It’s a very interesting map that points out the

• Drivers
• Trends
• Signals
• Suggestions (Make the Future)

that could lead to a scenario of distributed design and manufacturing systems. It shows the social and technological phenomena driving (drivers) these trends (contrasting where we are in 2008 with where we will be in 2018), signals (a company, network, project, product, idea, or innovation) and suggestions for using the map for travelling or, better, going to where it’s heading to.

And then I’d like to announce you that I’m very honoured to participate at the I Realize 09 event in Turin on June 9-10, as a co-facilitator for the Post-Industrial Design Workshop with the Turin-based Design Studio ToDo (Thanks Giorgio for inviting me!).

And as you can see on the workshop page, we are going to study and draw a map about the future of Post-Industrial Design, starting from Generative Design, Open Processes and Projects, Fabbing, Open P2P Marketplaces…
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C.STEM 2008 explores a scenario where the designer ability of writing custom software becomes the tool to connect the potential of digital fabrication to an ever growing demand of mass customized goods. Infinite variations, generated by open projects/processes, enquire the role and creative thinking of post-industrial designers.

The event featured an exhibition and two days of conferences presenting new forms, technologies and design processes.

Exhibition presented projects and works by:
Ammar Eloueini, Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz, Adrian Bowyer, Nervous System, Michael Meredith, Cait Reas, FLUID FORMS, Susanne Stauch, THEVERYMANY.

C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS – September 2008, Torino, Italy from todo.to.it on Vimeo.

Neon Organic 0052 (sketch) from watz on Vimeo.

Here is an interview wih Marius Watz from Generator.x and Code&Form about Generative Art.

It is interesting for us because it is closely related to complexity, software and design as the generative system could follow genetic and evolutionary rules or using open source software or code (but consider that it does not happen always).

From Wikipedia:

Generative art is a system oriented art practice where the common denominator is the use of systems as a production method. To meet the definition of generative art, an artwork must be self-contained and operate with some degree of autonomy. The workings of systems in generative art might resemble, or rely on, various scientific theories such as Complexity science and Information theory. The systems of generative artworks have many similarities with systems found in various areas of science. Such systems may exhibit order and/or disorder, as well as a varying degree of complexity, making behavioral prediction difficult. However, such systems still contain a defined relationship between cause and effect. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s “Musikalisches Würfelspiel” (Musical Dice Game) 1757 is an early example of a generative system based on randomness. The structure was based on an element of order on one hand, and disorder on the other.

An artist or creator will usually set down certain ground-rules or formulae and/or templates materials, and will then set a random or semi-random process to work on those elements. The results will remain somewhat within set limits, but may also be subject to subtle or even startling mutations. The idea of putting the art making process in the place of a pre-generated artwork is a key feature in generative art, highlighting the process-orientation as an essential characteristic. Generative artists such as Hans Haacke have explored processes of physical and biological systems in artistic context.

Generative art describes a strategy for artistic practice, not a style or genre of work. The artist describes a rule-based system external to him/herself that either produces works of art or is itself a work of art.

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After FluidForms (read this old post), here is another innovative Swiss company based on mass-customization and user co-created content, mShape.
And they use too multi-layered wood and computer controlled milling machines, but here complexity comes from the behaviour of the users, from their co-creation that generates “a population of tables”.

It’s not an open p2p marketplace, it’s not a peer production example, but it is a very good example of user co-created design. You can’t buy other users’ tables, so it’s not a marketplace and relationships between users are not fostered (nor they are interested in them). Therefore, it’s not a community but a co-creation business/service.
Actually, you can buy an mShape table in two showrooms in Zurich, where:

Our partners can provide you with a Nokia mobile phone for the time of your design

So the most important thing of mShape is that it works using mobile techologies i.e. easy of use tecnologies that have a wide reach. Just note that every project that is strongly based on user participation needs an enabler designer rather than a conventional one, a designer capable of developing a meta-design project where the user will be the conventional designer.
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After the post where I wrote about flocking algorithms used in a site-specific art/design installation by Todo Design, I ‘d like here to write about another experiment with such algorithms.

While surfing on Vimeo I found this video by Aaron Westre from Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), where he explains very well his master’s degree thesis on using flocking algorithms in order to design 3D architectures; here’s the video:

Introduction to Complexity Machine 1 from Aaron Westre on Vimeo.

Moving between design, science and computation Aaron Westre developed his his own software (you can download it here), “Complexity Machine 1” using the open source software Processing, where he runs his behavioral simulation describing the rules of the agents.

What is interesting in this project, is that the complexity of a system is not used as just inspiration or decoration, but as whole different way to design a structure, as if it were designed or modeled by a flock of birds.
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One of the key point of Open P2P Design is that the designer/s should become an enabler of the creativity that lays in a community/system. I will write something more about this theme in the future (a very long post is under construction), but for the moment I’d like to suggest you a brief example of a design studio that decided to act as an enabler of the customer’s creativity: Fluid Forms. Individual Design from Graz, Austria. This time I’d like to talk about their latest project, Fluid Earth.

Fluid Earth consist in an easy to use Online-Design-Tool, with which the user can design herself/himself unique objects (bowl or lamp) for the home, at home. The user can select a desired locality using GoogleMaps and see it represented as a lamp or a bowl. The selection can also be enlarged, decreased and shifted; at the same time the finished product is displayed as a 3D-Model.

Complexity here is not recreated artificially (as it happens in the generative design projects); instead it is gathered from an already existing database (localities and their geography and orography). The user is an agent that discover this complexity and transform it into a design project (in this case, however, complexity and localities are not addressed directly but only superficially, just at the aesthetic level).

Note that this is not a collaborative or collective project, it’s just a web-based mass-customization project; anyway, its importance lays in the idea that a design studio can work enabling not its creativity but someone else’s one (they call it meta-design).

Personal tastes are as different as people themselves.

For this reason Fluidforms offers everyone an individual Design. Our website enables you to design according to your own preferences with but a few clicks of the mouse. Create your own unique forms, and bring to life your own individual Design.

Individual Design involves designing not a single product, as in traditional design, but what we call a Meta-Design. A Meta-Design is a framework in which the consumer may modify his or her product. The designers job is to make sure that the consumer is supported in their design process and can not specify a product that does not reach functional or aesthetic requirements.