Sylvia Weidenbach is a jewellery designer from Germany who took us for our 8th Design and Technology talk. She is currently a designer in residence at the V&A. Her work focuses on the combination of 3d manufacturing processes with 3d design software tools.
What is interesting about her process is her combination of many different 3D visualisation and design technologies in the run up to the production of the pieces.
These complex and fluid, but fully defined models are then realised using 3D printing technologies. Which results in Sylvia's signature baroque form.
Her work is away from what PDE usually focus on because it is almost in the domain of pure aesthetic endeavour, although it isn't fully because in it's use of pioneering technologies, it explores the geometric potentialities of the future.
Her work is important because it is looking at new technologies and experimenting with them, finding form which is new but draws on previous historical inspirations - for example in Sylvia's case, the 'cabinet of curiosity' and the 'cullinan diamonds'
It is a fact of all design that aesthetic possibilities are strictly related to the constraints of delineation, visualisation, and manufacture. We see this thorough all of design history. One of my earliest blog posts looked at the evolution of architectural form, which was strongly related to new advancements in the ability to produce and understand more ambitious structures.
Modernism was subsequently enabled by new advances in mass-manufacturing and material technology which had an effect at all scales, from the thonet chair taking advantage of new steam bending manufacturing, to the large, brash rectilinear forms of modernist architecture taking advantage of developments in steel, glass, and reinforced concrete.
The urge-to-progress of todays architecture has to answer to this new paradigm of free-flowing design. Straight forms were fine in the age of linear structural analysis, and of 2D drawings which didn't permit much past millimetre lenghts and 90 degree angles.
We can see a practical example of the effect of non-constrained 3D design in the structure of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium currently being built in London.
The south stand is uniquely constrained by the fact that It has been built over a storage area which is to contain the retractable grass pitch. This means that the massive weight of the stand has to be held up using just two very narrow foundations. This has been achieved through the use of fluid 'tree' structures which hold the stand at various points.
Now, this could have been achieved, perhaps, which rectilinear geometries and could have been worked out using traditional paper-based 2D analysis, but it was probably easier given todays computer-based workflows to 'brute-force' a fully simulated solution using the pre-conceived 'tree' idea. The metal will have then been custom made and will almost certainly be right up to standard.
I think we will see more of this applied to less extreme solutions in the future, as digital workflows make this easier, if not cheaper. This may not become a universal language of all design, but there are many circumstances at many scales where It will be an effective design process.
What is interesting about her process is her combination of many different 3D visualisation and design technologies in the run up to the production of the pieces.
These complex and fluid, but fully defined models are then realised using 3D printing technologies. Which results in Sylvia's signature baroque form.
Her work is away from what PDE usually focus on because it is almost in the domain of pure aesthetic endeavour, although it isn't fully because in it's use of pioneering technologies, it explores the geometric potentialities of the future.
Her work is important because it is looking at new technologies and experimenting with them, finding form which is new but draws on previous historical inspirations - for example in Sylvia's case, the 'cabinet of curiosity' and the 'cullinan diamonds'
It is a fact of all design that aesthetic possibilities are strictly related to the constraints of delineation, visualisation, and manufacture. We see this thorough all of design history. One of my earliest blog posts looked at the evolution of architectural form, which was strongly related to new advancements in the ability to produce and understand more ambitious structures.
Modernism was subsequently enabled by new advances in mass-manufacturing and material technology which had an effect at all scales, from the thonet chair taking advantage of new steam bending manufacturing, to the large, brash rectilinear forms of modernist architecture taking advantage of developments in steel, glass, and reinforced concrete.
The urge-to-progress of todays architecture has to answer to this new paradigm of free-flowing design. Straight forms were fine in the age of linear structural analysis, and of 2D drawings which didn't permit much past millimetre lenghts and 90 degree angles.
We can see a practical example of the effect of non-constrained 3D design in the structure of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium currently being built in London.
The south stand is uniquely constrained by the fact that It has been built over a storage area which is to contain the retractable grass pitch. This means that the massive weight of the stand has to be held up using just two very narrow foundations. This has been achieved through the use of fluid 'tree' structures which hold the stand at various points.
Now, this could have been achieved, perhaps, which rectilinear geometries and could have been worked out using traditional paper-based 2D analysis, but it was probably easier given todays computer-based workflows to 'brute-force' a fully simulated solution using the pre-conceived 'tree' idea. The metal will have then been custom made and will almost certainly be right up to standard.
I think we will see more of this applied to less extreme solutions in the future, as digital workflows make this easier, if not cheaper. This may not become a universal language of all design, but there are many circumstances at many scales where It will be an effective design process.
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