More Edible 3D Printing...

One more 3D print to chew (over)...

The project in this entry has already been floating around the blog-sphere for a while, but as it relates to some of the more recent posts dealing with a similar topic I though it might be worthy to also be included here (to access the original posts click here and here)... Apparently Philips Design in Eindhoven have also dabbled with some ideas relating to bespoke food production in the context of Additive Manufacturing. Somewhat suggestive of Heston Blumenthal's culinary inventions, this, still conceptual, project which is a part of the company's Design Probes scheme, which aims to explore and predict (guesstimate) how we might live in a decade or two. The design, which works in a similar fashion to a 3D Printer, would 'fabricate' (cook and assemble) a meal based on each individuals nutritional needs (which would be read through a 'scanning wand' nutritional monitor) and partly from food grown in ones own Home Farm...

Click here for a link to the original article...

A link to a related R&D project by Philips Design, which in this instance aims to 'enrich' the act of consumpting food through the stimulation of a more multi-dimensional perceptual realm, can be viewed by clicking here...

Original image from the Dezeen blog...

Reverse Biomimetics - Mushrooms that look like they'd been CAD/ CAM'ed...

Our partner from the UK office, Paul Brady, sent us these photos of mushrooms which he thought looked like they could have been made through sone of the additive manufacturing processes, an interesting and astute observation, suggestive of something that could be termed 'reverse biomimetics', i.e. instead of a biological entity influencing a design, one designs a biological entity... There are a number of individuals who already have touched upon related/ similar ideas such as Francois Roche of R&Sie(n), Marcos Novak, Jonas Runberger and Marcos Cruz, to mention a few, and also, of course, some of the stuff in process at places such as the AA DRL, the Biomimicry Institute, and the Center for Biomimetics at the University of Reading.

As fleeting influences abound, why not learn from the core natural/ biological source which have had eons to develop the various most optimized solutions to the various bountiful queries we engage with daily...

Mud Village, Firq, Oman...

Whilst flaneuring (as one does) around some residential neighbourhoods in and around Nizwa, I came across an abandoned village completely consistent of rows upon blocks of two floor, assumedly residential, mud houses. They seem to have been abandoned for a while, as much of the debris surrounding these, now mostly collapsed and fragmented, buildings showed decades worth of wear & tear. However, what was still standing retained its own kind of gentle and sparingly sublime presence. These types of building can be found scattered most residential neighbourhoods in Nizwa, but usually only as singles or in pairs. Their narrow and shaded passages held their own intimate charm, which in scale and proportion were clearly laid out for the benefit of ambulatory users rather than the more substantial, and somewhat crude, demands of motorized vehicles. In their dishelved state, the few blocks of the village become perhaps even more evocative and catalytic than they would be if pristine. As ruins the buildings leave room for the imagination to, literarily, fill the gaps. Here 'what ifs' abound. A collapsed roof becomes an eloquent pergola, a protruding beam turns into a (dust?!) diving board, a shaded cranny assumes the form of a cozy nook. The mud walls of the place engage a more intimate, perhaps even domestic, sensory paradigm, where the width of the passages separating the buildings is narrow enough to allow one to run ones fingers simultaneously across both of the flanking walls, catch an olfactory whiff (guided to you by these same walls) from the nearby date-palm plantation, and, even from a distance, apprehend the muffled, steel-framed, clatter of a bicyclist making his way across the adjacent gravel paved road...

The village captures and reflects some of the timeless qualities which remain essential in all typologies of building, regardless of age, style, culture, function, or status...

Project Recap No.11 - Comet Vase (FDM)...

I found a displaced USB stick in a cranny of some jilted wardrobe, and came across a few, semi-blurry (atmospheric?!), photos of a forgotten vase design. The 'Comet' vase, which consists of a bundle of hollow, extruded tear-drop shaped, funnels vertically staggered so that only three of the pointed base-tips touch the ground (forming thus a tripod stand). The vase was made through FDM, and was designed over ten years earlier (during my Parsons days) but had to wait for over a decade to see the light of day...

There are two versions of the vase. Version 'A' (shown above and immediately below) is closest to the original intended version. It has a more slender and elongated silhouette and was actually fabricated after version 'B' (shown further below) which, due to a fault in the original design's STL-file, resulted in the heads of the cones unwinding (making them appear like 'albino-carrots'). This was originally considered a small calamity, but was eventually reconfigured as a fabrication-technique-specific trait and was even used as a intended feature (a 'designed' fault) in some related designs that followed...