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

prototyping. Materialise started off because their lamp division is actually a
very tiny division of a huge company that markets software and is probably I
would think the largest manufacturing bureau in Europe. For them it is a little
bit of advertising and at the same time they have a vested interest in the
technology that they are trying to promote. With Kundalini here was a company
coming to rapid prototyping for the first time they hadn’t used it in development
before. They were purely interested in what they could do with this in terms of
form. And what they wanted to achieve was a form that would baffle people -
that people would have no idea how to go about manufacturing something like
this. They didn’t want any rules, patterns or repeats that anyone could identify.
At the same time, as a slight contradiction to that they wanted it to be obvious
that there was some process behind it – they didn’t want something that was
just random because they didn’t think that would have a perceived value. So
they wanted some evidence of process but you not to be able to figure out how
that worked. It was a tricky brief to deal with in that respect. But what I wanted
to do and what I ended up doing was applying the rules and relationships that I
used to generate the FutureFactories collection but rather than changing the
overall form I was changing components within that form. So it is a tree or
bush-like form made up of a number of different components the circular ones I
thought of a flowers and the rest are leaves. The flowers have a hole in the
middle and the stems curl back behind that flower to block up the hole so you
can’t see directly through to see the light behind. But there is a lot of room to
manoeuvre with that form in terms of how it can change. So I think that the
flowers – there are around two hundred in the form and every one is different.
In the whole form there is something like a hundred chains of components - the
chains are about twenty elements long. There are a lot of different components
to the design but we set up a number of rules so each of the components would
change every time and then we used that to generate each different one as we
applied it.
This brings me to the project that I’ve done for this exhibition I wanted to use
the opportunity to work on something on a slightly larger scale. And also I had
been thinking for a while about the notion of using the potential of reverse
manufacture – designers taking on other people’s designs and adding bits to
them or if you had an artifact at home maybe instead of chucking the thing away
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