New Making is a course which encourages students to experiment with digital fabrication and understand how both materials and machinery’s boundaries be crossed. The subject areas we were asked to explore included hybrid materials, scaffolding glitches and parametric design. The machines we had available to work with were 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC milling, with a time frame of one week per exploration. The short time scale was intended to make us create small trials and experiments as opposed to designing a final piece. In this blog post I will briefly go through the three experimentations I have done and then explain the process of the one I have enjoyed the most. Firstly, the work done for hybrid materials had been inspired by Laura Spring’s lecture about her work. I have experimented with weaving techniques initially on fabric and then I proceeded in making laser cut cardboard templates for the weaving to be made. In this way, I was able to explore the combination between old weaving techniques and modern technologies. Secondly, for parametric design we have been introduced to Processing, a coding software, in order to create a 3D print. For this section I have looked into jewelry inspired or made with a parametric design. I found quite fascinating the contrast and the language created when combining geometrical shapes with the fluidity of the human body. The experimentation I worked on was the transformation of a cube to a hollow sphere whose surface is a net. Lastly, for scaffolding glitches I have looked at the artist Do Ho Suh and Unfold Design Studio. Their work inspired me due to their use of scaffolding and the perception that the structure is the most important part and not the actual inside. With these concepts in mind, I observed the structures created by the scaffoldings and used them to create the object rather than using them just for construction purposes. After the research I have created a few 3D models of fluid shapes and printed them making sure the support material was touching the piece everywhere. This prints created architectural shapes that from first appearance look like to be drawn as a whole piece and not a combination between support material and the modeled shape. Additionally, sections of the piece created extremely interesting shapes while printing. From these observations, I have started cutting the prints in sections and stopping the printer half way to have sections of the scaffoldings and to see the inside structures of them. In conclusion I have created two final explorations, informed by the process undertaken.
