Oct. 20, 2014

In May this year, Dutch designer Joris Laarman opened up a new exhibition at Friedman Benda gallery in New York called "Joris Laarman Lab: Bits and Crafts", based around the theme of digital fabrication and generative design tools. The artist employs cutting-edge tools, from CNC mills to 3D printers, to enable new shapes and explore the endless new possibilities of the digital revolution.

Born out of disagreement with the limited bounding box and poor material choice of many today's digital fabrication methods, Laarman's 'Bits and Crafts' are built from many parametric parts engineered to fit exactly like a 3 dimensional puzzle, each piece is either 3D-printed or computer numerical control (CNC) milled, depending on the material.

One of them, the black and white 'Puzzle Chair' was generated out of a single shape divided into 202 3d jigsaw puzzle parts. In collaboration with the leading open source 3D printer manufacturer Ultimaker, Laarman created the world's first 'crowd fabricated' chair. The chair is composed of 77 pieces and made on a 3D printer using ColorFabb XT- Copolyester material. The chair can be manufactured in about 10 days starting at 30$. The multiplicity of small elements enable greater freedom and complexity of shape, and it is also strong, snaps together easily and inexpensive.

"Bits & Parts aims to utilize small 3dprinters and cnc milling machines to fabricate full size affordable furniture available to all. By dividing designs into many small parts we were able to radically expand the potential of small consumer 3d printers and cnc milling machines. The 3D printed parts can be assembled into a piece of furniture like a three dimensional puzzle." notes Laarman.

The plans for the open source 'puzzle chair' can be downloaded here on YouMagine and bitsandparts.org.


"Everyone who says 3D-printing is just pressing a button doesn't really know how it works," Laarman said. "That's not really the point [of digital fabrication]—to have it not work without humans involved. It's more to have it customizable and to be able to produce things locally without all of the shipping of the industrial system," he added.

 

Posted in 3D Printing Applications

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