design digital network

A digital pottery workshop

In a big white space in Z33 stands a long table. On one side of the table, there is a chair.
When you are seated, there is an empty potter’s wheel and a green laser in front of you.
Behind the wheel the image of a revolving cylinder is projected. By touching the laser beam with your hand, the shape of revolving cylinder changes according to the movements of your hand. It’s a potter’s wheel where the material to be moulded consists of air. A virtual potter’s wheel. Visitors of the installation can mould the vacuum as they wish. Once they have completed their virtually shaped design, it is saved in a database. The last 16 designs are projected onto a white wall.

On the other side of the table, a machine transforms the virtual design into matter. Thin rolls of clay are layered on a downwards moving plateau. This technique is called 3D printing, also known as Rapid Prototyping or Rapid Manufacturing. Although in fact, there is nothing rapid about it. In order to print a 10 cm object, the machine takes about an hour. It’s soothing to watch, however. With each new layer, the humming motors sing to a more or less identical tune. Halfway alongside the table there is a display case in which the printed designs are laid to dry and displayed as artefacts of a new history.

L'artisan Eletronique

L’artisan Eletronique in my opinion is a very interesting project because broken the border between craftmanship and technology. A border that the most people think that can never be deleted because are one the opposite of the other. It is really fascinating how the studio has instead introduced the hand and the concept of imperfection (one of the main concepts of the handcraft system) into the 3d printing system as well. In this specific way people are not passive, powerless, in front of the machine, their can work together to the design of a object, and his history, his storytelling.
This project show how probably could be the “healthy” relationship between human-machine in the future, in which people are not just droids in constant dependence on technology, but they work together to answer at the constantly growing costumers request but in a more thoughtful way, not just for create an object because of it is needed.
This approach could be really helpful to contrast the globalization and homologation phenomena.

A virtual potter’s wheel as a physical design tool

Printing with clay is one thing, but designing objects that can be printed in clay is something else. Unfold’s virtual potter’s wheel adds a physical element to designing. By moving your hands, the digital material is moulded’. All kinds of accessories can be used to help create a mould: sheets of paper, pieces of bended metal, manufactured timber. A present day designer mainly designs with computerised design programmes. But whether he is writing an email or drawing an architectural construction of a building, the graphic interface leads to little or no difference between his physical actions.

The illogical relation between the graphic interface of a computer and its physical operation has often been pointed out. There are few references to the physical aspect of designing. The designed object is digital, but
also the tools that are traditionally associated with designing, such as a hammer, a saw, a plane, sanding paper, a mould,...have all been transferred to the computer screen. The physical connection with the end
product, as we know it from the craftsman, is practically nonexistent.
Yet, a digitally designed product still holds enormous advantages. Digital designs can easily be adapted and hardly take up any physical space and through the arrival various digitally operated machines, they can also be reproduc ed in different ways.

Between the supporters of physical craftsmanship on the one hand and enthusiasts of digital design created on the ‘universal’ computer on the other hand, Unfold chooses not to take sides, but would rather explore the production process of both working methods.
In L’Artisan Electronique, Unfold tries to narrow the gap instead of widening it. In this installation, the physical, traditional and the digital start to become one, as it were.

Rapid Manufacturing is a matter of producing each object as a precise rendering of its 3D digital design. At this point, the technique is so advanced that the resolution is high quality and the error rate is zero.

The ceramic objects that Unfold prints, however, are far from perfect. Sometimes there is an air bubble in the clay causing an unevenness, or they clay is too dry, as a result of which the clay doesn’t flow smoothly enough. Each object that has thus far been created with the clay printer has its own ‘character’. Some are practically perfect, others are surprisingly loopy, some have a fine resolution and others are coarse and quirky.

Within the world of craftsmanship there is a recurrent dilemma. On the one hand, there
are the craftsmen who glorify the traces of the creation process. A thumbprint, a slightly
jagged vase; all signs of the maker. Others rub and brush until all irregularities have
disappeared. There is a case for both. In a world of mass production, we aren’t used
anymore to imperfections and slight differe nces between similar objects. Even our fruit
and vegetables are grown in such a way that they are practically the same as our
neighbour’s. All cucumbers are equally long; otherwise they won’t fit in the box.
Consumers prefer tomatoes to be round and red. If an item is slightly damaged, it is sold
in a clearance sale as a b-choice

Thanks to the industrial revolution and the invention of the machine, mankind is able to make perfect, mass produced items that are indistinguishable from each other. A machine repeats the same movements over and over again. A craftsman, no matter how good he is, is unable to do this. This makes the machine, but also the items it produces, cold and distant. The Arts and Crafts movement already felt that a machine makes an object soulless. But the clay printer, on the other hand, is not perfect, which makes it and itsproducts a bit more human.

Designers have often commented on the need to create perfect products. The most
famous is perhaps Hella Jongerius’ B-service. L’Artisan Electronique also touches on the subject. Despite the fact that Unfold wishes to achieve a more convenient printing
process, they are also fascinated by the current flaws of the printing process. Researching the cultivation of these flaws is something Unfold wishes to pursue: a new imagery for new design methods.

To see the Artisan Eletronique comment of Claire Warnier
Assistent design critics and theory Sint-Lukas Brussel and designer at Unfold

NEW POINT OF VIEW OF THE HANDCRAFT AND TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIP

You can also have different materials and that can be also a link to introduce and to incorporate the concept of locality and the belonging to one's own territory and sustainability.
But you can also add different techniques, also the antique ones, that could allowed the storytelling to become a historytelling, and help to and it can allow to bring to light forgotten techniques that tell the story of a territory and its heritage.

THE BEAUTY OF IMPERFECTION

EVEN WITH DIGITAL TOOL YOU CAN SEE CLEARLY THE HAND OF THE MAKER

To see the Unfold design studio website

On September 2nd 2018, humanity witnessed the devastating loss of one of the worlds largest natural history and anthropological collections. A fire at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro reduced more than 90% of the museum’s 20 million artefacts to ashes.

Fortunately, hundreds of these lost objects had been 3d scanned in the years preceding the fire and today, these data ghosts offer the world a possibility to re-materialize their memories, and to interrogate how to add relevant meaning through these acts of re-materialisation.

Help us bring an artefact of Brazil's fire ravaged Museu Nacional back to life!

Rematerializing the lost objects

Bring the ancestral knowledge closer to new technologies such as 3D scanning and printing and use them to make the visual tangible.
In these collections (like Peruvian stirrup bottle “Felideo”), the hands of the makers interact with the movement of the machine. It represents that may be the machine is not so rigid and without a soul as is considered now, but that we only need to get to know what for many is still new and austere.