Process Post: Cilia, no.1 for the Surface Design Show

Cilia (closeup)
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I made a few posts back in October and November with little snippets of experimentation for a surface concept we’ve been developing.

Late last year we were asked by Annabelle Filler to contribute some samples of Metafoams to the Future Thinking segment of this years Surface Design Show. However, rather than simply show a material sample, we thought it might be better to actually develop something specific for the show.

A lot of my own research is about designing the form and structure of a material in parallel to play with its properties. Usually the challenges are mechanical in nature, but we thought we’d take the contribution to Future Thinking as an opportunity to just experiment with aesthetics, light, texture and touch.

We’ve been exceptionally lucky to be trialing Selective Space Structures from Netfabb an incredibly powerful program that allows you to design microstructures in rapid prototyped objects. With digital tools in hand, we began exploring different structural opportunities, to affect sensory impact.

Richard Beckett joined the project to provide some much needed input and our experiments began to really push hard at object complexity - the experimental results of which we have been posting. Things recently took a turn for the biological as we started to construct a complex scaffold through which to create resin Stalactite’s:

Variable resin stalactites grown on a SLS scaffold
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But for us, one of the most interesting experiments was the very first. By pushing the SLS machines to its limits its possible to construct fibres, no more than 0.5mm in diameter, that are like hairs to the touch. The concept of printing a fur got us pretty excited and we started to explore how we could apply such a construct.

Given the constraints provided by Future Thinking, we decided on a 240mm x 240mm x 80mm double sided tile. Inside this volume we wanted to control both the form of the tile, but also its structure to create a heterogeneity in the fibres. We did this by creating a surface topology (to control the height of the fibres) and a 2D gradient of pattern through which we could selectively control the thickness of the fibre individually. We could then use Selective Space Structures to populate our shells.

Modelling steps for Cilia
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Even at this scale, the sheer density of the fibres is over 50,000 in this tile alone. To create this without something like Netfabb’s tool would be incredibly difficult, just in terms of the complexity of the 3D model. Instead we are able to design and print the final tile in the space of days rather than months.

Cilia installed at the Surface Design Show 2012
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Cilia is on show at Future Thinking from the 7th - 9th February at the Surface Design Show at the Business Design Centre.

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Posted by: Sarat