FreeFormFab

Contour Crafting: Just Print a House

Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning. The potential applications of this technology are far reaching including but not limited to applications in emergency, low-income, and commercial

Our research also addresses the application of Contour Crafting in building habitats on other planets. Contour Crafting will most probably be one of the very few feasible approaches for building structures on other planets, such as the Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the new century.

Source: Contour Crafting 

Google Sketchup now ready to print

Creating a 3D printing file from a Google SketchUp file has never been easy. Today a new class of 3D printing technology has slashed the time and expense it takes to create a physical model. Our friends at CADspan just released a plugin that allows for the generation of solid, 3D printable files directly from a Google SketchUp model. This software re-creates a model by “shrink-wrapping” it with one continuous mesh. The result is a single object, in STL file format, that is completely solid and ready-to-print.

Source: Google Sketchup blog

BigDog

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight. BigDog is the Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth.

Photomake

Photomake, developed by Ponoko, allows a 2D sketch to be used as the design drawing for a product, which Ponoko manufactures by laser cutting a material of your choice. The 2D sketch has to be photographed or scanned, then uploaded to the Ponoko website, where software will interpret the design and create a final design.

Essentially the software vectorises a bitmap image, but anthropomorphising the process allows it to be thought of as the software deciding what the drawing really means. This is similar to what happens when one designer looks at another designer’s sketches, and it can be amazing how designers, who have been trained to speak the same language, can read each others drawings, whereas a non-designer will miss much of the information, or else place too much importance on a non-essential detail. It seems that unless non-designers are expected to become proficient in either sketching, or some kind of 3D modelling, the only way for them to satisfactorily communicate their design intent will be the development of software which is able to interpret their wishes. This software may have to guide them, and it may insist they are not able to do certain things, but it’s job will be to do what Photomake does, except with three dimensional designs.

Source: We don’t do retro

Tutorials on how to set up a Fablab

A series documenting the setting up and usage of a MIT styled FabLab in the Netherlands. Will feature step by step tutorials on how to use the different equipment in the lab.

Front: Sketch Furniture via Motion Capture

Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined.Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.

The Swedish design group FRONT has been working in Japan since September. During this time they have developed and explored the technique they used in the making of Sketch Furniture which they showed in Art Basel Miami / Design with Barry Friedman Gallery Ltd ( New York ).

• Front Design
• Instructable 3D Motion Capture
• Wikipedia

Digitally Fabricated House

Assistant Professor Larry Sass, director of the MIT Digital Design and Fabrication Group, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to design, fabricate and assemble the first entirely digitally fabricated house for their 2008 show, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. The exhibit features five full scale houses on the MoMA’s vacant exterior lot along with an interior exhibit which focuses on the history of factory-made and prefabricated housing throughout the world.

The design is a digital translation of the New Orleans’ style Shotgun House, complete with an ornamental front façade and a porch elevated off the ground on piers to allow flood-waters to rise and fall beneath the house. Every component of the house, from the structural members to the frieze ornamentation, was first digitally modeled and then CNC fabricated from plywood and plastic for a precise interlocking assembly.

Quick facts

• Entirely friction fit - no nails, screws or mechanical fasteners
• Composed of over 5,000 unique parts all fabricated on 2 CNC machines in 3 weeks
• 21 days for assembly by 3 people

Reviews and catalogue

• Brightcove
• Archpaper
• TED Blog
• Archecord
• Time blog
• Catalogue

Design and the Elastic Mind


Design and the Elastic Mind, a 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration.

Design and the Elastic Mind explored the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlighted designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. The Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.  

• Publication by Amazon
• Wordpress blog
• New York Times
• Businessweek

The beckoning promise of personal fabrication

MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab, a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It’s a simple idea with powerful results. As Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the boundaries between the analog and digital worlds. His famous Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) use digital technology to build physical objects. More