The Belgian rapid-prototyping company Materialise, founded in 1990 in the quaint university town of Leuven, could have simply leased its gigantic machines to other industrial concerns, filled its coffers, and happily chugged along in that way for at least a decade or two. But recognizing prototyping as a watershed technology with major implications for design, it spun off a creative division called MGX in 2003, which has since called upon stars like Arik Levy and Patrick Jouin to go wild dreaming up intricate furnishings that would otherwise be impossible to fabricate. Jouins One_Shot foldable stool, for instance, is a symphony of moving parts that is produced in a single piece using selective laser-sintering: A laser prints out the seat by drawing it, layer by layer, into a powder that hardens on contact.
As a sneak preview of MGXs 2007 line, I.D. asked four designers to create an object around the theme of Private that challenges the companys production capabilities. Their remarkable ideas are presented here.
Detail.MGX Dan Yeffet, JellyLab (Paris, France)
Israeli-born designer Dan Yeffet, whose plant-like Hidden vase and faceted Polyvase for Materialise MGX were unveiled at this years Milan fair, began his idea for a lampshade with the unmistakable pattern of a fingerprint, something that, when shared, is closely associated with the loss of privacyin this case the designers own. He stretched his print around a sphere, its unique swirls becoming channels through which light would shine. Yeffet says he prefers to call rapid prototyping rapid manufacturing, a distinction that helps explain his fascination with MGXs technology. This morphology cant be recreated by any other technique if we want to manipulate it into a product, rather than an art object, he says.
Damned Lampshade Luc Merx, Gagat International (Aachen, Germany)
Dutch architect Luc Merxs lampshade is an algorithmic mass of writhing nudes that recalls the classical motif of the fall of the damned. He imagines the lamp hanging above a dining table, the shock of the frozen, terrified bodies disturbing diners with age-old questions of guilt and morality, issues usually kept behind closed doors. By producing the piece with Materialises technology, Merx also has another historical reference in mind: The lamp is a masterpiece of virtuosity, similar to that of 18th-century ivory furniture, he says. But the difference is that this is not the result of our virtuosity, but that of a computer.
Especially For You Amanda Levete, Future Systems (London, United Kingdom)
That architect Amanda Levetes chromed bowl resembles a piece of mangled scrap metalor perhaps a necklace one would find in the MoMA storeis part of its intrigue: The private, handwritten message this is designed especially by me for you with love has been expanded into a 3-D form that hides its meaning from everyone but its owner. Levete offered the design to Materialise MGX because the complex twists of each letter and the gaps they create would otherwise be murderous to realize, even by hand. Especially For You is completely freeform, without any geometric logic, Levete says. She ups the thematic ante by proposing the bowl be put to very private useas a bedside condom holder.
Download Ross Lovegrove (London, United Kingdom)
Ross Lovegrove describes his sinuous Download pen as a state-of-the-art digitized form molded from the negative space of his own hand, although the veiny shell looks more like what youd find if you dissected that body part. Lovegrove, like Yeffet, defines privacy in terms of how much of his personal anatomy hes willing to put on offer. The pen is also a vehicle to promote one of his pet theories, which he calls Netification. I created the term to describe the lightening of structures, made possible only by rapid-prototyping, he explains. MGX is at the forefront of pushing this type of manufacturing and making it accessible to the emerging generation of design industrialists.