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

his computer. I wanted to try and automate this system. I wanted the designer
to be able to define a set of rules for this object so you almost choreograph this
like a movie. You then set it going and then it carries on in its own sweet way
generating design after design. But each one, hopefully with the rules that you
have set is still true to the design direction you wanted to give this product in
the first place.
When I started off I thought this was a blue skies research project (back in
2002) then in 2003 Materialise showed their first collection. This obviously
pointed the way that this actually wasn’t so far away in terms of the rapid
manufacture being already viable as a production process – albeit yes it is
expensive to design objects but in reality the prices of the lamps that Materialise
sell aren’t too different from the high end Italian manufacturers: Artemedia,
Flos – they are comparable in terms of price. So this is a viable process already
and that made me rethink slightly how far away this was and maybe it wasn’t a
blue skies project it was something I could start doing straight away.
While I was generating design outputs for the project I also spoke with
Materialise and we started working on a couple of projects and we
productionised a couple of designs. The first one was RGB which is based on
the tuber forms - this is it in laser sintered Nylon. They wouldn’t think about
individualisation just yet I’m still working on a company to work with on the
idea of individualisation there are a lot of hurdles to that which I will come to.
With this particular one the software was there to generate the form we
produced – four different ones, but four is as far as they want to go for the time
being.
This is Creepers and the idea of this one is that it is a series of petal forms and
the petals catch the light from some very tiny LEDs just 5 mil LEDs. The idea is
this creates a space divider or room divider with light. Really the idea here was
the idea of generative design and forms evolving to create this pattern making
the leaves different with each cluster.
This year I worked with an Italian manufacturer Kundalini and we produced
this table lamp for them - Entropia. This is quite a leap forward in terms of the
industry because here is a company that have nothing to do with rapid
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