Parametric Design furniture
August 20, 2023
Michaela Crie Stone lives and works in Rockport, Maine, where she creates pieces that push the parameters of function by blurring the lines between art, craft, and design.
Fabricator: Clement Zheng
Fabricator Description:
Parametrichouse: Laser cutting is widely used by industrial designers and mechanical engineers as a rapid modeling tool. However, designing and fabricating laser cut assemblies can be a complex and tedious process, especially for novice designers. Joints between different parts of an assembly is a key aspect of translating a digital model into a physical model through laser cutting.
Joinery was developed to facilitate this rapid modeling process as a parametric joint generation toolkit for laser cut assemblies. Through Joinery, designers simply define connections between parts of an assembly, while the system generates the joints. Joinery supports fabrication-aware design through six different joint profiles. These joint profiles were developed through extensive research and experiments with different materials and product types, and each profile caters to different design needs.
Patterns are uploaded into the system as SVG files. Designers then select from a list of joint profiles and which is applied to an user defined edge-pair. Joinery updates and generates the selected joints along the paths in real-time, and joint profiles can be customized to fit different designs, materials and laser cutter settings. These joint profiles can be saved for future use—and shared with other collaborators using similar machines and materials.
