John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

what functional use they might be to an industry that has no use for digital
production technologies at this time - everything pretty much is hand done.
There are four projects and I’ll quickly run through those. Alongside my interest
in working with industry was developing designs that are modular and allow
flexibility within the arrangement of things in order to let users have a unique
product or a unique outcome through providing units which can be arranged an
infinite number of ways. Roger Penrose developed the tiling system on the left
in the 1970s which allows that. It is called an aperiodic system because it allows
the arrangement of basic units in an infinite variety of ways, so that you can
produce an infinitely number of different designs which will always tile a plane
completely. So you can see there through putting a pattern within those tiles
you can develop new forms of patterning which can be quite symmetrical but
also be completely random. These designs are based on the two tiles you can see
at the bottom of the slide. These designs can obviously be modelled threedimensionally
within a CAD modelling system.
In terms of computer output none of what I have done is very high tech at all. I
purposefully tried to keep these strategies or methods I developed quite simple
so it wasn’t going to scare people into thinking “Well I’m a plaster maker, I’m
not a computer modeller.” Actually, the only computer controlled equipment I
employed in this project was a CNC milling machine to cut profiles for a
traditional plaster spinning process. On this slide on plasterwork development,
you can see the CNC the milled metal profiles which can be used to spin plaster
circles, or create ‘runs’ if you want a straight elements in a design. These were
just tests for me to fiddle around with, I actually use a slightly different method
of cutting whole circles at specific angles which then fit together to create the
same designs as you would get using the individual tessellating tiles. So this is
what is installed –or something very similar – in the show and these are the
units used to put it together. This slide illustrates the first exhibition that I
showed the piece at. So although the underlying structure of this work is an
aperiodic tiling system you can’t see this in the finished work, you just see the
overlaid pattern. You can just about see my layout lines there and so the
underlying tessellation. This is a different design based on a slightly different
pattern within the tiling system.
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