The research team at the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) and the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) have taken morphological inspiration from the structure of the sea urchin and the sand dollar, both sea-bed invertebrates, to create what almost bears semblance to a floating bee hive, in a team combining architects, engineers, biologists, and palaeontologists.
The subject of this article by Katia Bertoldi, Vincenzo Vitelli, Johan Christensen and Martin van Hecke is Flexible Mechanical Metamaterials. Mechanical metamaterials exhibit properties and functionalities that cannot be realized in conventional materials.
Katia Bertoldi of Harvard held a holey plastic metamaterial that looked like a pink Connect Four board, with a regularly repeating arrangement of holes. When squeezing the material, some holes became horizontal ovals, as you would expect in an ordinary material.
Conduit is an open source plug-in authored by Proving Ground. Conduit enables designers to create custom data visualizations and heads up displays that update with your parametric models.
In this video by Boss Laser you can see how to make a rigid material flexible using your laser cutter. There is a way to use laser cutting to create 3D objects from flat materials, and it uses a clever design element called a Lattice or Living Hinge.
In this article the authors, Sebastien J.P.Callens and Amir A.Zadpoor review recent origami and kirigami techniques that can be used for this purpose, discuss their underlying mechanisms, and create physical models to demonstrate and compare their feasibility.
A team of MIT researchers has designed a breathable workout suit with ventilating flaps that open and close in response to an athlete’s body heat and sweat. These flaps, which range from thumbnail- to finger-sized, are lined with live microbial cells that shrink and expand in response to changes in humidity.
1:1 prototypes (Spring 2012) conducted by Jelle Feringa at the Hyperbody research group of the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, Netherlands, invited Matthias Rippmann to teach about designing funicular shells with RhinoVAULT. rV was used for the design of the exciting cut-foam pavilion resulting from the 2 week design-build digital fabrication workshop.
This is a 4D printing video by Pranavee M of 4D printing in action. 5 videos put together showing tests from MIT Self assembly laboratory demonstrating the functionality of shape transformation. Flat-printed structures that, once placed in hot water, slowly folds themselves into another structure.
A multidisciplinary team of Wyss Institute scientists, engineers, and architectural designers at Harvard University are developing Origami Organs that could function like artificial kidneys.
In this video by NOVA PBS Official you can see that biology and the physical world around us appear to be governed by origami-like patterns. Throughout our natural world, patterns are incredibly pervasive — whether they be spirals, fractals, tessellations, stripes, or even simple symmetry, they can be seen in nearly all living or nonliving things on Earth.
What is Tessellation? An educational video animation by M. C. Escher inspired Tessellation Art, which explains the basic principles behind tessellating shapes and patterns. It shows a simple visual demonstration of tessellating triangles, squares and hexagons.
Fold finding – a novel approach to folded structures – This project, created by Architect Tal Friedman, describes the design and fabrication process of the first self supported folded cantilever made entirely by folding sheets into their final position.
This video is a lesson by Eric Broug, animation by TED-Ed. Geometric pattern design is arguably the most recognizable form of Islamic art — it shows up everywhere, from mosques to government buildings to paper.
Quadrature is a audio/visual performance project by Griduo* in collaboration with Due3* that interacts with the perception of santralistanbul Art and Culture Center’s Main Gallery building located in Istanbul/Turkey.
A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a way to use 3-D printers to create objects capable of expanding dramatically that could someday be used in applications ranging from space missions to biomedical devices.
Polish designer Oskar Zieta has created a public sculpture in Wrocław using an inflated steel technique he plans to use for larger works of architecture. The Nawa pavilion is installed on Daliowa, one of many small islands in the Oder River where it runs through Wrocław.
This video from Two Minute Papers is about auxetic materials. Auxetic materials are materials that when stretched, thicken perpendicular to the direction we’re stretching them. In other words, instead of thinning, they get fatter when stretched.
Things aren’t always what they seem . . . or are they? Extreme close-ups often obscure the full picture. Cloaked in mystery, this new video introduces a variety of objects and moments — found at MIT — that invite you to take a second look.
Sebastian Errazuriz Studio is creating a series of kinetic sculptures that focus on interactive furniture. With his functional sculpture projects, Errazuriz is rethinking the everyday and “breaking open the box.”
A team at the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS has developed a new microscale printing method to create transformable objects. These “4D-printed” objects go a step beyond 3D printing to incorporate a fourth dimension–time.
Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang is the largest automobile theme park in Korea, located about 40min northwest of Seoul. The highlight of the exhibition is the Design Area featuring a beautifully designed kinetic sculpture and a spectacular 360 degree film presentation for which designers have created multichannel sound and music.
In This video by LGG EPFL you can see the development of novel deployable structures that can approximate a large class of doubly-curved surfaces and are easily actuated from a flat initial state via inflation or gravitational loading.
Harvard researchers have developed a general framework to design reconfigurable metamaterials. The design strategy is scale independent, meaning it can be applied to everything from meter-scale architectures to reconfigurable nano-scale systems such as photonic crystals, waveguides and metamaterials to guide heat.
Rhynamo is an open source plugin for connecting Rhino to Dynamo and Revit. Rhynamo uses OpenNURBS to help designers translate geometry and data for use in a BIM workflow.
NASA is using origami to build a giant star blocker, in hopes of imaging distant worlds. “Origami, the Japanese tradition of paper-folding, has inspired a number of unique spacecraft designs. It’s little wonder that it fascinates NASA engineers: origami can seem deceptively simple, hiding complex math within its creases.”
Octahedron by Alex Fox an amazing woodworking 3D Fretwork, a scroll saw project. In this video you can see the making (Cutting, finishing and assembling) of a geometric plywood sculpture.
Making of scroll saw fretwork ornament “Art Deco Shadow Box” of painted MDF 3 mm by Alex Fox
In recent decades origami structures and forms has been of increasing interest to mathematicians and engineers. Mathematicians are more interested in the geometrical aspects of origami objects such as foldability of origami patterns, especially foldability of developable surfaces.
Make A Ripple (2017) is a custom kinetic sculpture. It consists of 60 moving elements that are interconnected with springs. The elements are counterbalanced rods with disks on the ends which can pivot freely on a kind of universal joint.