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By Susan Towers
Advancements in additive manufacturing (AM) are spurring a paradigm shift in digital design and production that’s impacting consumer products and the art world.
While not exactly a new technology, 3D printing is the focus of a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Aram gallery. “Send to Print/Print to Send” will showcase how designers are pushing the boundaries of additive manufacturing (AM) and will feature the work of Michael Eden, Riccardo Bovo and others. This latest show (which will run from 13th January to 25th February, 2012) comes hot on the heels of an exhibit curated by veteran New York-based design purveyor Murray Moss that took place at the Victoria & Albert Museum as part of London Design week last September. Entitled “Industrial Revolution 2.0: How the Material World will Newly Materialise” Moss worked with Belgian industry pioneers Materialize, who use the latest laser and software technology to “print” 3D objects. Moss commissioned 3D printed projects form eight designers including Stephen Jones, who created a special reproduction of the museum’s 1827 bust of Lady Belhaven, to which Jones added a more contemporary hat! 'A sophisticated fabrication process once reserved for prototyping is quickly becoming ubiquitous,' says Moss. '3D printing is profoundly permeating all areas of our contemporary material world, including fashion and domestic furnishings, as well as transportation, medicine and architecture.' Headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, and with a staff of more than 800, Materialise has been playing an active role in the field of Additive Manufacturing since 1990. The company works primarily in the field of bio-medical and clinical solutions such as medical image processing and surgical simulations.
The V&A exhibit included the Fractal.MCX table by Platform Studio and Mathias Bar, which was recently acquired by the musuem for its permanent collection. A complex piece based on patterns from nature, it was created from a single piece of resin and would be impossible to produce without 3D printing.
Increasingly designers across all disciplines are making use of the technique that commonly uses polyaminde or nylon that the “printer” layers to build up the 3D form based on a computer drawn scan. If you’ve ever tried to bring a new product to market, you’ll know that the cost of prototyping and manufacturing is significant. Recent advances in digital design and newly affordable 3D printers are spurring a revolution in production and reviving creativity as more and more people are turning to 3D printing as a means of rapid prototyping. “We aim to be awesome!” Bre Pettis announced as he showed me around MakerBot Industries in a quiet street in Brooklyn. The staff (a motley crew with a clear appreciation for the art of the tattoo) were all avidly engaged in producing Makerbots which sell for around $1,200. The so-called Thing-O-Matic is a new and improved version of their original Cupcake and they’re shipping thousands of these very affordable 3D printers each year. The majority of their customers are just people who are interested in making things – hobbyists, some of them, to be sure. But many designers are beginning to realize the creative potential of having your own 3D printer on hand. Pettis and his co-founders Zach Smith and Adam Mayer, founded the company after they were frustrated in their own efforts to buy a 3D printer.
They built their version working on some of the efforts of the Raprap project, an open source 3D printing effort that was developed significantly by an online community of interested parties. In the last two years, Makerbot has also built an incredible community by encouraging open source sharing of design ideas to their
Thingiverse.com site. There you can download designs for everything from working toys to jewelry designs or parts.
More and more, 3D printers are being used to produce actual products, as opposed to just making prototypes. Using the new and improved technology to print parts and products has the potential to transform manufacturing. Production-grade plastics and metal and other materials in development are moving the industry away from models (in architecture, for example) to the production of whole industries – or in Scott Summit’s case, whole limbs. Summit and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are printing and selling entire customized limbs at Bespoke.
With a background in designing consumer products, and a personal interest driven by a chronic condition, Summit is ideally poised to look at the real world applications of 3D technology and one of his biggest clients is the Veterans Administration. Bespoke and other firms like them are creating products that have increasing appeal for young vets around the world who don’t always want their prosthetic limb to look “natural” and instead embrace the futuristic look of half man-half machine. Summit is particularly excited about Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) which he believes is every bit as disruptive as the innovation of additive manufacturing itself. “Additive fabrication launched a new way to embody CAD models of any complexity, but the SLS process has opened the door to the creation of additive parts that are also structurally sound, and scalable" he said. "It owes this versatility to the use of polyamide powder. The powder-bed process allows parts to be created in a 'cake' of compressed dust, and eliminates the need for support structures to be eliminated manually, as some other processes require. Furthermore, sintered polyamide can be both strong and flexible, depending on the mechanical design.” Summit is excited about the SLS process for other reasons too - since the SLS process is generally indifferent to injection molding laws demanding consistency in nominal wall thicknesses, one part may now have strong, load-bearing characteristics in one designated area, while another region may be designed to flex or torque, and still another may be hollow and filled with a complex structural lattice. “The result is a designer's dream process and material: any characteristics can be added anywhere to any part. Flexibility of this type has never before been so easily implemented,” he added.
3D printing may soon do for manufacturing what computers and the internet did for the creation, processing and storing of information. It’s clear that the new technology is permeating all areas of our material world, from fashion to medicine, and body parts to art. When it comes to additive manufacturing, form really does follow function.
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