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.
Having access to a laser cutter in a Fablab, designers at laxap wanted to give a try making a stacked laser cut sheet sculpture. They found much inspiration in the work of Gabriel Schama, but wanted something way simpler for a first attempt.
Having better skills for parametric drawing rather than hand-made illustration and taking a programmatic approach, their tool of choice is OpenSCAD, which allows to combine 2D and 3D techniques, and to preview the final result.
Design process includes these steps:
- A central lotus shapes gives an oriental accent, surrounded by an intricate mesh.
- Each layer is basically constructed the same way.
- For 3d preview, the layers are stacked in OpenSCAD in the Z direction.
- Laser cutting requires vector files, so the OpenSCAD project is modified to place all plates side-by-side on the floor, allowing a single SVG file export.
- Finally the SVG export is post-processed in Inkscape in order to obtain individual vector files that can be sent to the laser cutter.
