I recently got back from a trip to New York, having been there during ICFF and all the design week activities surrounding it. I was somewhat surprised at how little rapid manufactured furniture there was within the main show (unless you count laser cutting, which was impossible to avoid and demonstrated little that wasn’t being done five years ago), but outside .MGX was again showing it’s new collection at Moss, this year entitled E-volution. I should say straight off that the curation of this exhibition isn’t particularly clear: some of the pieces on display are from previous collections, and not everything in the new collection is on show. Nonetheless, it occurred to me whilst walking round that the designers and pieces involved fall into three distinct categories of the exploration of design for rapid manufacture.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

It’s worth making clear at this point that when I say ‘design’ I mean the kind of design that .MGX promote and specialise in. The kind of design that’s sometimes called “Design with a capital D”; the kind of design which non-designers usually associate with the word and which some designers dislike because they feel it misrepresents what design ‘really’ is. This is design whose reason for existence is spectacle, whose aim is to make people take notice through initial observation rather than through extended use. Normally I would say there’s too much of this kind of design, and much of it is rubbish. But Materialise has a clear objective, which is to push the boundaries of rapid manufacturing and showcase what the technologies are capable of. If the result is more designers and manufacturers understanding what RM technologies can achieve, then that’s a good thing.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required.

Fugu vase by Hani Rashid © .MGX

Many .MGX lights fall into this category. Being able to design and manufacture an internal space of great complexity allows the designer to play with the way in which light escapes from a volume, as well as the shadows it creates.

Tulip lamp by Peter Jansen © .MGX

A further branch of the Design as an Exploration of Production category continues the idea of manufacturing what would conventionally be ‘impossible’ forms, but reduces the complexity to much purer geometries. Bathsheba Grossman has worked with Jiri Evenhuis to up date an earlier version of the Torus lamp, in which two simple donut forms interconect. Another example from Freedom of Creation (of which Evenhuis is a partner,) though not produced through .MGX and thus not on show, the Rollercoaster bowl.

Rollercoaster bowl by Janne Kyttänen © Freedom of Creation

The second category is what I call Design as an Exploration of Craft. The main use of rapid manufacturing in this category is as an enabler of actually getting an object produced, an object which would otherwise be too expensive, or require too high a level of expertise, to be manufactured. It doesn’t necessarily mean that only one object is ever produced, more that, even if the production volume never rises above one, the design is still a success. In many ways, it’s possible to see more evidence of this kind of design in past .MGX products than in the newest collection – it seems the ability to create one-off pieces is no longer the wonder it once was. The Damned lampshade by Luc Merx is from 2007, but was on show at Moss, and exemplifies this category.

The Damned Lampshade by Luc Merx © .MGX

The lampshade clearly refers to classical images of the fall of the damned, such as those of Gustav Doré in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s about as far removed from what’s usually considered to be ‘good design’ as it’s possible to get, and it’s difficult to imagine it would ever have been made if rapid manufacturing did not exist. Merx refers to the complexity of 18th Century carved ivory furniture as an influence, a craft which is highly skilled and nowadays virtually obsolete (not to mention, largely illegal). The .MGX website describes how selective laser sintering technology allows this intricacy of form, but this lampshade is not an exploration of that intricacy. Rather it takes the capability for granted, and uses it to explore a very personal vision of the designer. In a similar way, though more whimsically perhaps, Dan Yeffet’s Forbidden Fruit bowl is a take on original sin, as well as a pre-emptor of Shapeways Creator service.

Forbidden Fruit bowl by Dan Yeffet © .MGX

The final category I have termed Design as an Exploration of Design. Here the end product may display traits from either of the first two categories, however the most important thing is the way the designer uses the capabilities of rapid manufacturing to explore new ways of designing. I have written previously about Assa Ashuach’s AI stool, on show at Moss, and the way it was designed using a kind of ‘reverse’ finite element analysis to determine where the stool should be rigid and where it should flex in order to create the minimum possible volume of material. In one sense it can be argued that the designer didn’t design the AI stool, Assuach designed the process, and the process designed the stool.

AI stool © Assa Ashuach

A similar notion, i.e. a design process in which the designer does not control the final outcome of the design, is apparent in the Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald. Based on traditional Asian furniture in which tree roots are shaped to create individually unique pieces of furniture, each Root chair is digitally ‘grown’ within variable parameters. There is little information in the show about exactly how this is done, but this investigation of an ‘evolving’ family of forms is something also being explored by Lars Spuybroek’s MyLight (included in the show at Moss), as well as Lionel Theodore Dean of Future Factories.

Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald © .MGX

As well as the Torus lamp with Jiri Evenhuis, Bathsheba Grossman is also showing the Gyroid lamp. Grossman is well known as an early exponent of rapid manufacturing technologies which she uses to make mathematical sculptures. Her background as both a mathematician and artist lead to the creation of sculptural forms driven by equation and geometry in which the personality of the designer determines the meta-design but is strangely removed from the symmetrical, repeating details. According to .MGX

In nature, the gyroid is found when two immiscible fluids are forced to occupy the same space. These fluids interpenetrate but do not dissolve together. The same is true for the Gyroid.MGX which divides the 3D space it occupies into two regions. These regions are identical, interlocking, and yet remain completely distinct from each other.

Gyroid lamp by Bathsheba Grossman © .MGX

These three design explorations encapsulate the types of creativity rapid manufacturing is facilitating amongst some designers today. They don’t just relate to the work produced by Materialse .MGX, they are also able to accommodate, for example, Front’s Sketch Furniture and Future Factories Ghost chair. In time new areas can open up, but if you can think of examples today which don’t fit, I’d be interestd to hear.