Yoo Jin Shin-LookingOutwards-03

Meshu: 3D-Printed Custom Jewelry

Process diagram and example Meshu earrings

In 2012, Rachel Binx and Sha Hwang launched their 3D-printed custom jewelry business, Meshu. Binx and Hwang found a way to materialize and share their expertise in design technology and love for travel. A customer simply needs to enter locations of personally significant cities and a “Meshu” is generated and fabricated. “The data for Meshu comes from OpenStreetMap, and is served from Mapzen.”

I think the whole concept of Meshu is unique and very personal. It goes beyond capturing memories through photos or buying a souvenir magnet from the places you’ve traveled. The custom jewelry seem bold, but their special significance is not explicit— many would assume the piece is simply a random geometric shape. However, since the algorithm uses the meaningful locations specified by each customer, it always creates a unique piece.

Rebecca Kim – Looking Outwards – 03

The concrete house serves aesthetic value–both on the exterior and within.

Unveiled on April of this year at Milan Design Week, “3D Housing 05” is Milan’s first 3D-printed concrete house, the work of CLS Architetti’s Massimiliano Locatelli. He offers several interesting facets of consideration, including commentary about building installations on the moon.

“3D Housing 05” was built with a CyBe mobile 3D concrete printer, and its mobility specifically allowed for unconventional geometry to be instated. Its environmental implications are a bit obscure to me as the house was constructed out of mortar as opposed to a common PLC compostable bioplastic. However, the debris is recycled into new housing which perhaps reduces waste and reduces use of lumber. Furthermore, the roof houses an urban garden which has positive implications.

This prospect is particularly exciting for me as housing crises ride metropolitan areas. The construction through 3D-printing reduces not only the cost of each unit but also the amounts of human capital and time required.

Ultimately, Locatelli considers a plethora of criterion, and brings the project to completion with an awareness of aesthetics.

Looking Outwards 03: Under Armour

Instantly when prompted with the idea of generative design, I thought of Autodesk and the work they did with Under Armour to create the Architech shoe. With today’s tech and designer’s love of sneakers, it was inevitable that a mass market 3D printed shoe was going to hit the market.

The shoe sole is designed with the wearer in mind and provides a rather sensitive approach to footwear. When they developed the shoes, they weren’t just trying to showcase the tech, but also took into account the user experience of it all.

They began in Fusion360 and generated the structures, they used Autodesk’s Myriad program to create the pattern of cells. The advantage of using Myriad was that they were able to test out many variations of spacing and design till they arrived at their final result.

I like reading about tech and the role it playsinto product design because alot of conceptual artwork exists with tech, but taking the concepts and finding a practical application can change so many things in industry.

Shirley Chen – Looking Outward – 03

“City of Dream” Hotel Tower is a newly-built project by Zaha Hadid Architects. It is a 40-story luxury hotel in Macau. Exposing its exoskeleton mesh structure, it is perceived as a “sculptural element”. This hotel contain two towers which are connected at the podium and roof level with two very organic bridge, forming a external void. Zaha Hadid Architects’ projects usually are in organic, bold, and expressive form. “The tower’s exposed exoskeleton reinforces the dynamism of the design. Expressive and powerful, this external structure optimizes the interior layouts and envelops the building, further defining its formal composition and establishing relationships with the new Cotai strip,” described ZHA in a press release.
Architects: Zaha Hadid
Architects Location: Cotai, Macau Design Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher
Project Directors: Viviana Muscettola, Michele Pasca di Magliano Facade Director Paolo Matteuzzi
Project Architects: Maria Loreto Flores, Clara Martins, Michele Salvi
Project Team: Pierandrea Angius, Luis Miguel Samanez, Massimo Napoleoni, Bianca Cheung, Miron Mutyaba, Milind Khade, Stefano Lacopini Davide, Del Giudice Luciano, Letteriello Cyril Manyara, Alvin Triestanto, Muhammed Shameel, Goswin Rothenthal, Santiago Fernandez- Achury Concept Team: Viviana Muscettola, Tiago Correia, Clara Martins, Loreto Flores, Victor Orive, Danilo Arsic, Ines Fontoura, Fabiano Costinanza, Rafael Gonzalez, Muhammed Shameel
Developer: Melco Crown Entertainment Limited
This work is very impressive that the architect exposes its skeleton directly and also embraces a boldly expressive form which requires huge efforts in the construction process. In the stage of developing process, parametric digital modeling played an essential role in the design. By repeating and varying one module, the architect creates an amazing huge-scale appearance of the building.

Lobby Atrium. Image © Zaha Hadid Architects; 2014 Melco Crown Entertainment Limited

Facade Detail. Image © Zaha Hadid Architects; 2014 Melco Crown Entertainment Limited

http://
Visual Tour for “City of Dream” Hotel Tower

Curran Zhang- LookingOutwards-3

Four chair designs generated from the usage of AI

The chAIr Project was created through the collaborations of Philipp Schmitt, Steffen Weiss, and two neural networks. The point of this project as to reverse the roles of chairs and human and switch up the normal perspective of everyday objects. As designs for chairs become more functional and efficient for the everyday usage, the idea of creating a chair without those constraint was put into play. Through the usage of AI, 20th-century chair designs were contained in a data set and the best quality of the chairs were pulled out. The best quality is no longer based on functional or efficiency but based off what is the prettiest and most visually captivating. Through the creations of AI, there were chairs that looked nothing like furniture or not functional at all.

Generative designs created to complete the final concept

This project was interesting as it tries to let observers have a perspective that is complete opposite that of a human perspective. Although the chairs generated hold no function as a chair, this project stimulated us into thinking what would be the “prettiest” chair without normal constraints of functionality. I believe that kind of thinking should be implemented in all designer’s concepts. Creating a perspective that doesn’t follow the observers’ assumption; creating chairs that are not for sitting or creating space that shouldn’t exist. Having observers questioning their predetermined thoughts help push designs to a new level.

Four chairs that does not need to follow the concept of sitting

The chAIr Project – Reversing the role of human and machine in the design process

Kai Zhang-Looking Outwards-03

Tverrfjellhytta,© diephotodesigner.de

Tverrfjellhytta / Snøhetta

Architects: Snøhetta

Location: Hjerkinn, Dovre Municipality, Norway

Interior And Landscape Architect: Snøhetta Oslo AS

Project Team: Knut Bjørgum landscape architect (Design Team Leader), Kjetil T. Thorsen (Partner in charge, Principal architect), Erik Brett Jacobsen, Margit Tidemand Ruud, Rune Grasdal, Martin Brunner (Architects) Heidi Pettersvold.(Interior Architect)

Area: 900.0 ft2

Project Year: 2011

Photographs: diephotodesigner.de, Ketil Jacobsen

The Norwegian Wild Reindeer Centre Pavilion is located at Hjerkinn on the outskirts of Dovrefjell National Park, overlooking the Snøhetta mountain massif. The 90 sqm building is open to the public and serves as an observation pavilion for the Wild Reindeer Foundation educational programmes. A 1,5km nature path brings visitors to this spectacular site, 1200 meters above sea level.

The signatured feature of this project is the sculptural interior installment. It’s fully designed digitally using parametric tools. They would like to create a form in a box to represent the geological effects of its sorrounding environment. So they generated the form in 3d modeling software. And later the raw wood material was sculptured using CNC machines – the digital controlled mills that can precisely shape the raw material into desired form.

The final state was rather stunning, the orgainic form grew on the boundary of another form of order. And the spaces created by the installment was also very natural inspired but also ergonomically comfortable. The hybrid of nature and artificial compound was exceptioonally beautiful and elegant.

Tverrfjellhytta,© diephotodesigner.de

Tverrfjellhytta,© Ketil Jacobsen Tverrfjellhytta,plan

https://www.archdaily.com/180932/tverrfjellhytta-snohetta

Katherine Hua – Looking Outwards – 03

Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport features an art installation called “Kinetic Rain” created by German design house ART+COM. The installation is meant to offer a calming effect in the busy Singapore airport terminal. This visual experience of fluidity, distinctive shapes, elegant and refined movements was brought to life through parametric computational algorithms and digital fabrication. Kinetic Rain is made of up more than a thousand bronze droplets attached to the ceiling through steel wires. The steel wires are connected to a computer program that can control how the bronze droplets rise and fall. The computer designed movement creates slow, fluid to create refined yet simple shapes, from abstract to three-dimensional forms. I admire how this art installation was able to use parametric digital design and parametric fabrication methods to explore the how the computer can be used to be more than just a tool. The creator’s of artistic sensibilities are reflected in Kinetic Rain as they use computers as an artistic medium that explores the technological and scientific aspects.

Kinetic Rain by ART+COM, 2012

Jacky Tian LookingOutwards 03

Generative Design – The Water Cube in Beijing

Exterior View of The Water Cube

The Water Cube is the perfect prove that the generative design provides a powerful opportunity for architecture to explore new ideas and techniques regarding structure. Generative design becomes a new introduced grammar in architecture. Moreover, with the help of generative design techniques, architects can explore the relationship between environment and structure. For example, in The Water Cube, during the day the building mostly rely on natural light and safes 55% of the energy for lighting. Also, the envelope is built with 3065 blue air cushions with customized sizes that can withhold the 20% of solar energy. With the solar energy reserves, it can be used to heat the swimming pools. In addition, 80% of the rain can be collected by the facade and be recycled and reused.

Interior View of The Water Cube

Source Link: https://www.arup.com/projects/chinese-national-aquatics-center

Victoria Reiter – Looking Outwards – 03

Product design studio uses CAD software to craft stone architecture inspired by nature

Anoma, a product design studio, combines seemingly un-like forces to technologically create natural masterpieces. The studio takes inspiration from nature, such as the delicate and often overlooked vein structure on leaves, and amplifies it to create large-scale works of sculpture and structure on slabs of materials such as granite, marble, and limestone. Designs are first etched out by hand, then drawn using CAD software, amplifying the patterns, charting out where lines will be deeper, until it is sent to a CNC machine to be cut out before ultimately being finished by hand.

See the process below or here.

What I find inspiring about this is how it combines unlike forces: inspiration from nature, execution by technology; large machines cutting through hard rock, with delicate finishes by human hands; utilitarian and heavy building materials like rock, being used for delicate art.

Furthermore, growing up my dad always told me how he operated CNC machines for the better part of his life. Since I was a kid when he did this, I never really thought about what this meant. So, seeing a video of a CNC machine operating gave me insight into what it is he did for 28 years.

More information available here.

Looking Outwards – 03 Min Lee

Skyline is a computer-generative music video by Raven Kwok created using many core principles which were used to generate beautiful visual patterns, one of the principles being Voronol tesselation, a geometric model that is used by many computational artists. The geometric patterns in the music video create a behavioral diagram that shifts itself not only according to the audio of the song but also to the animated sequences of the vocalist singing.

What I find amazing about this project is the artist’s ability to use large amounts of geometric shapes to seamlessly create visual stimulation to represent not only the instrumental, but to also use those same shapes to create a smoky figure of the vocalist. The vocalist’s face is fully recognizable as a person if not only for a split second before once again seamlessly changing into an array of different shapes and inkblot-like figures. The creator’s artistry shines through in his ability to not only create computer-generative, but to also use music as a part of his medium.

Source: http://parametricworld.tumblr.com/post/129838926923/prostheticknowledge-skyline-music-video-for