tonight's lecture supported by the
Robert B Church Memorial Lecture fund I
usually like to say a word of thanks to
the faculty committee who organizes
these things I'm the chair of the
committee also it also includes Jennifer
Aikman Gale Fulton Diane Fox and Matt
Roush and all the various staff who
coordinate this stuff because it's a lot
of logistics in the background that
doesn't really show up tonight I have
the distinct pleasure of introducing
Jessica Rosenkrantz Jessica is a
boston-based artist designer and
programmer and co-founder along with her
partner Jesse Louie Rosenberg of nervous
system a generative design studio that
works at the intersection of science art
and technology I and I know many of you
too have been mired Jessa Jessica and
Jessie's work for a long time and we're
really glad to have finally have her
here to lecture for this evening if
you're looking for someone to follow on
Instagram they're really great Jessica
and nervous system create software as
much as hardware they design processes
and systems more than forms they find
complex systems of formation and
organization in natural phenomena and
then they develop and train algorithms
and computer programs to perform in the
same way they use generative processes
in which there's no definitive final
product per se but a range of possible
outcomes and their outputs the outputs
of their effort range from jewelry and
clothing to art and housewares to
objects and toys they fearlessly
cross-disciplinary bounds a lying with
biology material and computer sciences
engineering and manufacturing among many
others the work of nervous systems been
featured in The New York Times The
Guardian wired metropolis Fast Company
among many others and exhibited in the
museum Museum of Modern Art the
cooper-hewitt
the Smithsonian Design Museum and the
Museum of Fine Arts Boston for me
nervous systems one of the most vibrant
and creative outfits in the world of
computation and design that we have
available their constant exploration of
natural
and possibilities is matched only by
their commitment to rich and varied
computation and design outputs there are
creative formally and aesthetically at
the same time that are creative creative
technically and materially and I think
it's a rare combination that makes them
such an important studio in the future
of the design disciplines without
further ado please join me in welcoming
Jessica Rosenkrantz oh it's my
microphone work I have it turned on
sweet we turning off the lights are we
leaving them you prepped me for the
lights being turned off okay hi
everybody thanks so much for coming to
listen to me talk tonight as you just
heard and that extremely flattering
introduction my name is Jessica and I
run a design studio called nervous
system I started my studio back in 2007
when I was studying in architecture grad
school at the GSD at Harvard and my
partner was an undergrad at MIT and what
we sort of wanted to do in our studio
was create a place where it was okay to
combine techniques from what I was
studying biology and architecture what
my partner was studying math and
computer science which we didn't really
find a way to do in college and our
studio has just been a sort of place to
mash up techniques from these different
disciplines as you heard we work in many
different materials and we make a myriad
of different products ranging from
jigsaw puzzles lighting jewelry
furniture sometimes things even up to
the scale of architecture we're
collaborating with biologists and we
work in many different materials like
traditional woodworking 3d printed
ceramics metalworking many other things
as well but what sort of unites are a
body of work isn't the products we make
or the materials we work with but
instead our generative design process so
really what we like to say is that our
medium is computation and more
specifically using computation to adapt
processes and patterns from nature into
design tools our projects often start
from a natural phenomena our project
hyphy
which is from 2010 was inspired by how
veins form and leaves we started by
looking at scientific research into how
this process can be modeled
computationally and then we translated
that research into an algorithmic system
that allows us to explore this pattern
space and develop new types of
structures not seen in nature our
intention and studying natural patterns
is not to directly copy or mimic their
forms but to really understand and adapt
the logic behind them and to design
tools that we can use more broadly
although leaf foundation is really a
sort of two dimensional process we
started thinking about what are the
three-dimensional implications of that
algorithm might be and ended up creating
this design system that we use to create
a series of lamps called the hyphy lamps
from 2011 sort of like leaves on a tree
every single product that we make in our
studio is different so for every lamp we
generate a new form and we 3d print a
different structure in order to produce
designs like these we can't just call up
a factory in China and ask them to
injection mold some plastic every single
one is different so we need to work with
manufacturing techniques that allow for
that type of one of a kindness
computer-controlled manufacturing like
3d printing laser cutting robot
manufacturing water jet whatever floats
your boat these days open up all sorts
of new possibilities for how we make
stuff they enable us to make incredibly
complex objects like these lamps quite
easily they make it possible to create
one-of-a-kind designs affordably and
they're also increasingly accessible so
they're starting to be in people's
offices homes libraries sort of putting
complex manufacture in the hands of more
people than ever before however this is
sort of all a bit more of a dream than a
reality we have these machines all over
the place but how do you tell them what
you want them to make how do you design
the forms that they need to fabricate so
part of the problem behind this that we
see at my studio is design software
design software it's very difficult to
use it's expensive and most of it was
sort of designed in a period before we
had this sort of manufacturing so it's
more aimed towards older forms of
manufacturing that didn't allow for this
sort of complex
or uniqueness so part of what we do at
nervous system is explore creating new
types of playful design experiences that
try to leverage simulation and web
technologies to make it possible for
anyone to create one example of this is
this application you can play with on my
website called cell cycle that we
created in 2010 which is sort of an
interactive physics simulation that
allows you to sculpt and form cellular
objects sort of just in real time
playfully in the browser these pieces
can then be ordered directly by people
off of our site and will 3d print them
for you and many different materials our
design systems are very frequently
inspired by the complex dynamic
processes that we see in nature these
processes are systems that grow and
adapt to different conditions and the
resultant shapes that we get are
expressions of the processes and
underlying conditions that generated
them the idea formas process is an
interesting counterpoint to how humans
have usually constructed objects we
typically take a very top-down approach
to design we might create by sort of
directly specifying volumes measurements
and shapes somewhat determining the
essence of the final outcome right at
the beginning computers are often touted
as offering all these new ways of making
stuff but we find that design software
often testers reproduce methods by which
we made things before computers so we
have software that gives the experience
of drafting sculpting or painting and
they translate how we've traditionally
worked with physical materials into a
kind of strange digital analogue of
those experiences generative design
tries to propose a different direction
can we take inspiration from how nature
creates designs and focus on developing
interactive processes that we can engage
with so instead of creating static
objects we could instead create dynamic
systems instead of drawing structures we
try to grow them so I'm gonna go through
a couple of projects that we did in my
studio the first one is sort of going to
deal with this idea of growing
structures and what does that mean so
we're gonna take a brief look at biology
and how systems in nature create form
this project it's called flora form so
one question you might come up when you
might come up
you're thinking about organisms and
nature is how do we go from a single
cell to a sort of complex differentiated
structure like a plant or a human being
if a single cell were just to grow and
divide uniformly you would actually just
end up with the formless blob however
through some sort of very carefully
coordinated subdivision and
differentiation biological systems are
able to produce structures that have
specific forms and functions in my
studio we've started calling this
differential growth and it's a really
simple idea actually some forms grow
more than others some parts of a
structure grow more than others and that
leads to differentiated structures but
how is that growth controlled one
example that you see all the time
outside or in your window is plant
tropisms so a plant can redirect its
growth towards a light source for
instance by a long gating differentially
across the stem so it's a way of
translating an environmental signal that
has a gradient like light into a
changing amount of growth that leads to
a specific differential form bending
towards light creates curvature you can
apply the same idea to two layers of
cells you have two layers of cells and
one layer is growing faster than the
other that gives you a concave or convex
shape sort of very simple difference in
growth rate yields basic shapes that we
might appreciate this project sort of
got started to me when I read a paper by
a professor at Harvard named Mahadevan
he published a paper that said that you
could explain how flowers bloom and how
leaves ruffle by a very simple procedure
if something just grows faster at its
edge it yields these complex ruffled
forms which is kind of amazing it's a
these shapes have a lot of different
curvature to them and they can all be
explained just by a very simple rule
just grow faster at the edge his models
is pretty fascinating to me just because
of its simplicity so after reading this
paper I started just seeing this
phenomena all over the place you're
walking outside you see it on flowers
see it on succulently you've see it on
kale leaves on your lettuce plate they
all have that sort of shapes you could
describe as being generated by growing
faster at the edge
not just implants though sort of all
streams of life the arms of jellyfish
and anatomy certain types of fungus
cactuses bryozoans corals all of them
have shapes which although they have
totally different biology and totally
different genetics appear to be
generated by a simple growth procedure
grow faster at the edge quick diversion
my favorite example of this is this guy
have any of you ever seen these guys
before nobody so this is going to blow
your mind these guys are called lettuce
sea slugs you'll find them all in the
Caribbean they have this totally
intricate or neat insane ruffle on their
back which you might think is totally
impractical like what are they doing
with that but it turns out there's a
totally functional reason for that
ruffle they have a really weird behavior
called klepto plasti they eat algae and
instead of just digesting the algae they
rip out the chloroplasts that's the part
that can translate light into sugar and
they just fill their back with
chloroplasts and they become like a
mobile solar farm so the more ruffle
they grow the more chloroplasts they can
harvest and stick in their back and the
more energy they can produce which is
really cool and totally just a
divergence but since none of you had
ever heard of them before I figured now
is the chance to tell you so you're
aware another example of this sort of
insane hyperbolic curvy growth happens
in a flower called cockscomb which you
might commonly see at the florist as the
thing on the right is a really roughly
shape actually it's supposed to look
like the plant on the left it's supposed
to look like this bushy Christmas tree
thing and there's a mutation that
sometimes happens which causes it to
grow like the shape on the right so when
I heard about this plant I started get
really interested in sort of what
happens in this space in between these
two growth forums like this is one plant
sometimes it grows one way sometimes it
curves another way when there's a
mutation there's some powerful growth
algorithm that we could develop which
would explain both of these forms and
map out sort of the entire space in
between them which might sound very
esoteric but this is how I got started
on working on this project and
developing a system to explore these
sorts of growths so
well now I really skipped ahead here so
I wanted to build a computational model
that would let me explore this realm of
forums I'd read a paper it was very
abstract they didn't have any
computational implementation I wanted to
make a system that would let me do that
so I started to build that digitally and
for me I haven't made this explicit that
means writing code everything you'll see
in my presentation was written generated
by code that I wrote either in C++ or
Java Script so when I'm working it
typically doesn't look like these cool
animations it just looks like a bunch of
text on my screen but eventually we get
here so this play again no I can't make
this play again oh and now we're stuck
so this thing that we're stuck looking
at forever can we go back now okay so
this thing is what happens in my
simulation when I just grow uniformly
all growing at the same speed everywhere
it doesn't just get bigger it actually
makes this wrinkly roughly blob and this
is sort of like what happens with cancer
you have cells that are growing out of
control and the result is not business
as usual the result is this uncontrolled
mass of cells in the simulation I sort
of try to establish baselines of growth
modes so these are all hemispheres that
are growing at different rates in
different places
the first one is growing fastest in the
red area same here except for the red
area is allowed to split which creates
branching forms and the third scenario
is the one I'm describing where you're
growing fastest at the edge and it
produces these sort of ruffling green
light forms this is sort of what happens
when I first begin creating a system I
have some theory I have some
implementation I build and then I reach
this stage where I have it basically
works and I'm testing based scenarios
but the big question is sort of well
first off how do you build that and so
what's happening underneath the
animation you just saw is that we have a
sort of spring based surface that's
represented as a mesh and we're able to
make it grow at different rates in
different areas which is encoded by the
color and all the animations
show you and then we have kind of basic
collision detection that's done by the
spheres so the thing doesn't intersect
itself and has basic sort of physical
properties after I sort of constructed
the system and have these baseline
models of growth can really start
exploring how it behaves and try to
manipulate the material and
environmental conditions to really
create a system that we can control and
sculpt I kind of like to describe our
practice as a form of digital gardening
but instead of cultivating plants for
cultivating algorithms and ultimately we
want to craft systems that have their
own kind of innate behaviors but that we
can also really interact with and
manipulate so as we're developing our
software we encode all sorts of
influencers gradients manipulators etc
that allow us to have control over what
it's doing to guide it but what
interests us and playing with systems
like this is isn't just that we're
totally controlling but there's this
interplay between what it does innately
sort of its material properties and our
manipulations of that some of these are
very simple things like changing the
stiffness of the material and others are
more complex relationships that change
through time this one is pretty cool
just changing the different zones of
growth and it yields these forms that
have different symmetry we're changing
the scale as the thing is growing to
yield a sort of fractal condition all of
these digital experiments ultimately
become translate into some sort of
physical objects so the first things
that we did were actually just a series
of sculptures and that were made using
selective laser centering the bottom one
is sort of combining the first system I
showed you the leafy nation system with
flora form system also did some
experiments that are type of spin on
19th century zoetrope
where we creates or physically animated
sculptures where the colors represent
the rates of growth for the that
generated these structures and those are
printed right on the models however my
studio is mostly revolves around and is
known for just making sort of everyday
objects
so at nervous system we do a lot of
weird esoteric research and then how we
disseminate those ideas and experiments
is through affordable objects so most of
the money that we make is actually just
from selling things like jewelry or
lampshades that are generated by the
systems that we create so for this
collection and we created a series of
specific growth algorithms each which
yields a specific piece of jewelry those
pieces are then sort of materialized as
jewelry pieces using selective laser
sintering which produces nylon jewelry
or 3d printed in wax and then cast using
the traditional locks blast casting
method in sterling silver we feel pretty
strongly that ideas about nature and
computation shouldn't be limited to
academia or research or really
theoretical projects but should start to
diffuse into our daily lives and that we
can take everyday products like jewelry
and have them embody really complex
ideas okay I'm gonna talk about a
completely different project that's on
like opposite side of the spectrum of
what we work on called kinematics which
is a little bit about how to fuse
fashion software and 3d printing
together to examine how digital
fabrication can really impact the way
that we create clothing so how can we
leverage these tools not just for sort
of aesthetic exploration but instead to
allow for more customization and
personalization of everyday objects
since my studio works primarily in
software we think a lot about how to
open those tools up to the public so
we're not just creating tools for
ourselves but creating applications like
be sure to allow anybody to create
things this project became from came
from thinking about textiles and how 3d
printers can be used to create different
types of textiles this might sound a
little bit weird at first but textiles
are actually human creations they're
like these materials which have been
transformed to have different behaviors
based on how matter is arranged in space
so you might have a material like wool
or cotton but when we arrange that into
something that's a weave or a knit that
really changes this behavior they're
kind of a meta material where their
behavior comes from how we have chosen
to arrange those fibers in space it's 3d
printers that are like a different way
to arrange material in space where we
can start to create more variable
strange arrangements
what sort of textiles could we create
with that tool
computation also has a really long
influence on textiles or history and
textiles the jacquard loom which was
first demonstrated in 1801 I think a lot
of people sort of think about it is the
first computer OMA schism was the first
machine that was made to do things with
punch cards they would weave these
extremely intricate richly Illustrated
fabrics by encoding the information of
the design onto punch cards I think it's
interesting then the textiles have this
we're probably they're not only like man
created materials but they're also sort
of historically computationally mediated
for us we sort of took the simplest idea
that we had first and then tried to
build a whole system of textiles on top
of that so the idea we had was well what
if we make a hinged textile 3d printers
generally work with hard rigid materials
but by structuring our design as
interlocking triangles we can create
things that start to behave more like a
fabric we wanted to create an general
textile that had material properties
that could vary through space so can we
change its rigidity its porosity its
drape and its shaped through space we
started to play with this idea very
small making small scale pieces like
necklaces or bracelets and we're really
interested in the way they moved is they
had a kind of strange hybrid behavior
they're not hard and they're not soft
they're somewhere in between and sort of
after creating these small pieces I
immediately started to want to create
something bigger like I started
imagining what would it be like to wear
a long dress that's made out of this
hybrid stuff that's hard and soft but
how could we do that lots of projects in
the realm of digital fabrication take a
really big thing like let's say a
building and then they chop them up into
lots of small unique pieces which then
have to be hand assembled and arranged
into the final configuration this sort
of hand assembly if the project often
ends up being the most complicated part
takes more time than it did to generate
the design that's so you sort of have
take computation and made your life
harder we were sort of thinking about
though could we take advantage of the
fact that our design is flexible and use
that to find a way to compress our
garment into a smaller bound
box that could then be printed all as
one piece so what if we can take
advantage of the sort of innate
flexibility and combine that with the
simulation to reduce its size which sort
of got us excited it seemed like a cool
idea and then Akkad is thinking all
these different ways because if you can
make a sort of garment fully in 3d that
kind of changes the way you think about
making clothing after all bodies are
three-dimensional they're curvy weird
shapes by clothing is normally made
totally in flatland we have flat
material fabric and we have flat
patterns which are then sort of
painstakingly sewn together into
three-dimensional clothing but if you
can make a garment totally in 3d and
then you can start from a body scan you
could design in 3d and you can make a
garment that nothing ever has to be cut
sewn or assembled to just emerges fully
formed so this was a cool idea but in
order to actually implement this there
were a lot of different problems we had
to address and a lot of different
aspects of the project that had to come
together to make it work so problems
with materials and 3d printing problems
with creating the software to make this
possible problems with how do you 3d
scan and fit things to bodies and
promise with the actual simulation that
makes the whole thing work we sort of
started at the micro level of the
garment so the garment is ultimately
addressed but really at the beginning
all we were doing was designing 3d
printable hinges sort of a little bit
tricky situation where we want to make
the hinge as tiny as possible so the
garment can have a lot of flow and
movement but if we make it too small it
will fuse together we're really working
kind of just above the tolerance that
selective laser sintering allows so the
beginning we just designed prototypes
and physically tested sort of hundreds
of different hinge mechanisms to find
them one that we'd be able to build up
on top of going from there we then
decided we would test a small thing so
we designed a necklace and we crumpled
it up in our simulation and we printed
it and that worked so we scaled up and I
three nice command of myself just using
a Microsoft Kinect which is actually
just a game controller and then
i crumpled that up and printed it that
worked so i scaled up again this bodice
is the first thing we made that sort of
had over a thousand unique interlocking
pieces and it's printed all as one piece
and this we're really starting to figure
out like how is it going to fit how
comfortable is it going to be isn't
gonna break and fall apart I wanted to
figure all of that out before I printed
a very large costly object and then at
the same time we were doing those
experiments we started thinking about
how to create a design application that
would allow anybody to create these
objects all of the sort of little
prototype things I just showed you were
created and code that we made that had
no user interface whatsoever you would
just run some code on a mesh and it
would produce something but there was no
way to control it or see what the heck
you were doing which is not ideal
obviously and so we started working on
this and it's called kinematics cloth
and it's another web application you can
use on our website it's just built in
JavaScript and WebGL and hypothetically
allows you to create garments either
from 3d scans of your body or from
measurements of your body I'm so sort of
the key idea behind this is that you're
always working in 3d so it's never
decomposed into flat views and you can
paint and draw directly on the body
changing the silhouettes and sort of
styling different tops you can change
the hemline etc you can add different
styles of perforated pattern you can
change the underlying sort of
tessellation of the garments you can
make it more rigid or more drapey and
all of this is sort of done in real time
another set of problems as I mentioned
was 3d scanning how do we actually
create garments they're gonna fit people
and while 3d printers well not 3d
printers 3d scanners are increasingly
available in the form of like game
controllers and apps for your iPhone
these things are very glitchy and noisy
so that's somewhat of a problem is we
actually need a really high quality scan
so we're able to tell things like
where's your neckline which part is your
armpit are you slouching or are you
standing up straight that's all sort of
contextual information that isn't
captured even if the scan was perfect so
we got really lucky and that we found a
collaborator who happened to be working
exactly on
project on this problem called body Labs
who had created a kind of parametric
body model based on machine learning
from thousands of scans from different
people so their system sort of works by
you provide them with either
measurements or scan data and then they
refit that data onto a perfect
parametric body and adapt that mesh and
so that gave us a way to sort of always
be designing on a clean mesh that was
the same between different people and
allows us to map any garments designed
for one person onto another person's
body in a very sort of logical correct
way the last part of the project is the
simulation so how do we actually take
these garments which are composed of
three to six thousand unique
interlocking rigid bodies and fold them
down into something small enough to fit
in a 3d printer
well we initially conceived of just
taking a garment and sort of wadding it
up to barely fit it in the printer that
turns out not to be the most efficient
way to pack clothes into a 3d printer
sort of like when you put things in your
dresser you don't just wad them up you
sort of fold them in a logical way and
then they fit in quite well
that ended up being really the best
strategy for us as well as we developed
this software we can do sort of
sequential folds of the garments and
then reduce them down to sort of over
85% of their original volume for
printing so we can take the simulation
and we can use it for really practical
stuff like making things more compact
and fitting them in a 3d printer but we
can also use it for things that helped
us design better so these garments are
made out of all of these strange hinge
pieces of different sizes is really hard
to understand how they're going to move
and flow so we can use the simulation as
a sort of feedback loop while we're
designing each garment look at how it's
going to drape and move and then use
that to impact how we're designing it
before we actually print anything so we
did sort of all of this work and we
actually never made any garments it was
just a conceptual project and we had
this cool video but then I got an email
from a curator at the Museum of Modern
Art paul antonelli
and she had seen the concept video and
was interested in potentially acquiring
a dress for their permanent collection
which you
as the young designer getting email from
the curator at the MoMA being like I
want to be part of this like a huge deal
but I don't know if she actually knew
that we'd never made a garments like
ever and that we weren't sure it was
gonna work so this video was filmed that
Shapeways 3d printing Factory in New
York the day before they actually needed
it at this moment meeting that only
happens two times a year and we were
like watching it come out and it was
super stiff and we weren't sure like if
it was working at all or if we messed
something up I mean there's all this
powder in there that has to be shut out
it's the way the process works is by
using a laser to fuse together some but
not all with powder so this point we're
just super nervous that spent all this
time working on it it was gonna be like
a total failure but luckily we were able
to shape out a lot of the powder on this
vibration table and then I called my
friend and she came down and tried it on
and it's probably one of the most sort
of satisfying moments of my life seeing
that this idea like actually worked
after spending like more than a year
just like thinking about it and
prototyping and testing it so yes good
moment so this dress then is the first
one we made and it's kind of intricately
patterned structure that has more than
22-hundred unique panels that are
interconnected by more than 3,300 hinges
and they're all 3d printed is one piece
of nylon well each component is totally
rigid they sort of in aggregate start to
behave like a continuous fabric that
allows the dress to flex ly conform and
flow in response to body movement unlike
traditional fabric the textile is very
non-uniform it varies in rigidity drape
flex and porosity through space but
really good thing we're most excited
about that the entire piece is
customizable so starting from a math 3d
scan of your body you can completely
change the design the shape and the fit
the whole thing and then there's some
more slides here that I forgot I put
here we made more dresses
they look different
this one has scales on it but it's
basically the same deal
okay so completely different project now
jigsaw puzzles I'll often go and talk
about the jigsaw puzzles project because
people are like you make jigsaw puzzles
that's so weird tell me more about the
robotically fabricated dresses but
jigsaw puzzles turn out to be in an
exceedingly large part of our business
in the past couple of years so I feel
like it makes sense to talk about so
this record is a little bit more about
thinking about how to sort of take
traditional craft practices practices
and sort of reinterpret them through
digital fabrication most people know
about cardboard jigsaw puzzles they're
these mass-produced cheap cardboard toys
that are made with a die cut of metal
that punches cardboards and they feature
very simple repetitive forums which
assembled to make a picture of like
kittens or a national park or something
however puzzles actually have a long
history they first came about around the
1800s they were cut by hand from wood
they were not actually kept of the
jigsaw that's a misnomer they're cut
with the scroll saw right around the
invention of the scroll saw and everyone
was one-of-a-kind because they were made
by people who are cutting them by hand
so necessarily they were all going to be
different but because wood and hand
cutting allowed for considerably more
freedom you had interesting developments
that people had very different piece
styles some people might have things
more squiggly or some people might cut
things more sort of rectangular and
there are all sorts of special pieces
embedded in the puzzle like unique
figures that you might recognize
so we wandered upon like a store in
Paris called puzzles Michelle Wilson
where they still hand-cut wood puzzles
and we're just kind of blown away by how
intricate and beautiful these pieces
were we started just thinking about like
well we have some laser cutters in our
studio we could use these to make wood
puzzles but what would sort of be the
interesting unique thing that we would
do with the wood puzzle around the same
time I also got this fossil of an
ammonite ammonites are relatives of
cephalopods that lived around 110
million years ago so they're like
related to octopuses and on the
ammonites shell they're these really
cool patterns called suture patterns
which were actually the walls in between
each successive
chamber of the shell as they would grow
they to add on a chamber and for some
reason the walls were shaped like this
scientists argue about this a lot why
are they shaped like that and they're
never gonna find out because they've
been dead for over 110 million years so
there's not really an answer but I was
looking at this and thought wow these
would be amazing puzzle pieces these are
really weird interlocking shapes so it
sort of took me down a series of reading
scientific articles and talking to
people about how would you simulate or
grow shapes that look like this the
first thing I actually thought of is
this really fun experiment that I
encourage everybody to do you just need
two pieces of glass and some glycerin or
other viscous fluid and water it's
called a hellish oo cell and it's
experiment where you inject a low
viscosity fluid into a high viscosity
fluid and it naturally forms these
extremely intricate branching patterns
so I looked into how to simulate this a
little bit turns out to be extremely
computationally slow like if you were
trying to grow a puzzle like this it
would take multiple days so that didn't
pan out then I started reading some
papers about laplacian growth in general
which is basically growth processes that
are driven by diffusion like diffusion
of electricity is lightning or a
diffusion of pressures what we just saw
is those hella Shaw cells I was reading
about diffusion of temperature which is
called dendritic solidification and lead
so weird crystals look like this so what
we came up with is essentially a way to
grow jigsaw puzzles where we start with
a bunch of points randomly distributed
then we grow each piece into each other
piece which sounds kind of simple at
first but when you think about it like
in nature you would grow like a solid
into a liquid like an ice crystal into
liquid water but if you want to grow all
of these different pieces next to each
other you sort of to eat just as many
phases of matter as you have pieces so
in the simulation to make these puzzles
we created a system where you have sort
of infinite phases of matter that grow
into each other which is pretty weird
and just an example of the sort of
things you can do in the computer that
are inspired by real life but would
never make sense in actual
reality if you were to physically
implement them so we ended up creating
these puzzles called the radial puzzles
which feature art by a friend of ours
named Jonathan McCabe who's an
incredible computational artist every
single puzzle is unique it has a
different set of pieces and a different
image and there are laser-cut at our
studio in Boston
these puzzles sort of started to get out
what we liked about traditional wood
puzzles but like our own spin on that
more recently we made a new series of
puzzles that are inspired by slices of a
Gabe so these ones have a slightly
different cut styles you'll see these
more sweetly pieces and every one has a
different shape in addition to a
different image and a different series
of pieces the images are kind of grown
from an initial seed and then grow a
kind of layer by layer by varying the
kind of conditions that they're growing
with they yield these unique bands of
color and unique shapes the cut style
for these pieces up there we have the
image generation
the cut style for these pieces is based
on a simulation of lengthening elastic
rods so we have a bunch of pieces that
are just essentially
rods and they grow in lengthen and as
they lengthen they sort of push each
other and intertwine to make these very
intricate puzzle piece shapes now that's
all well and good these are still kind
of normal puzzles whatever but we sort
of think about what you can do a
simulation that you couldn't ever do by
hand like what would be impossible to do
as a person so one thing you can't do is
a person if you cut two pieces apart
with the saw blade those are the only
two things that would ever go together
you wouldn't be able to cut a separate
piece somewhere else and have it
actually match up so just hard to think
about making a puzzle that was extra
difficult so like what if you took away
everything that makes a puzzle easy to
do no image no edge goes together in
multiple ways and then we call this the
challenge puzzle we thought oh we've
done it this is gonna be the hardest
jigsaw puzzle that you can think of we
were wrong then we came up with this
other idea what if we made something
called the infinity puzzle so at the
challenge puzzle like I said we try to
get rid of everything you would start
with so there was no edge but there
still sort of was an edge like it
stopped in one place what if you made a
puzzle that was based on
the topology of a torus so one side
matches up to the other side and the
bottom matches up to the top then you
have a puzzle that has no fixed boundary
is it tiles and it really has never any
end you could just keep doing it forever
so there are symbols in all of these
different ways sort of unending
different shapes so that's that's good
that's challenging however there's
there's other mathematical figures that
you might think could make even more
interesting puzzles like what if we took
the topology of a Klein bottle where the
edges match up but they flip over that
might be an interesting puzzle turns out
this is really challenging puzzle
because not only do you have a puzzle
has no beginning and no end but actually
is no top and no bottom pieces from one
side as you're gonna see you can pick
them up flip them over and they
seamlessly connect on the other side
there we go flip so we sort of chose an
image from the Hubble telescope of the
Milky Way galaxy and dubbed this the
infinite galaxy puzzle and every time
you assemble it it makes a different
picture of the galaxy we're really
interested in seeing how kind of new
technologies like laser cutting can
allow us to create sort of new versions
of traditional crafts but do it in a way
that isn't just an imitation of what
traditional crafts are but really an
extension of what was great about them I
didn't put a lot in about this but I
figured it's newer work so I just drop
it in here the past year we've been
doing a lot of work with 3d printed
ceramics and also traditional ceramics
this collection that we did in
collaboration with a 3d printing company
forum Labs is using a new ceramic resin
that you can print on any SLA printer
it's sort of a hybrid process for you 3d
print resin that's infused with ceramic
then you fire it in a kiln up to two
thousand three hundred and forty degrees
burns out all of the plastic and it
leaves behind a sort of pure vitreous
ceramic which you can glaze as you
choose and then we also have been doing
work sort of combining simulation with
mold making for traditional ceramics
creating this cuff sort of inspired by
brain coral where we're able to create a
sort of multi-part
slip casting mold that allows us to
create very intricate sort of totally
traditional / ceramics but with hidden
seam lines so we can make up for a part
mold where there are no seam lines left
after casting so we really like to do
work in our studio that combines sort of
not just digital methods and not just
math but also with like hands-on working
with traditional craft methods and
traditional fabrication techniques just
leave this part here but it's really
cool
this hermie is it's just really exciting
to see it come out I don't know if it's
gonna work there it is it worked okay
now we can move on no idea where I'm at
on time 620 how long am I supposed to go
until as long as I want okay so
another project on the other end so all
the projects I showed you so far are
projects that we just did in our studio
that are totally self generated like we
came up with an idea and we implemented
it we did it for ourselves and we
monetized it as a product ourselves to
pay for the project and other scenarios
we are hired sort of contract work for
big companies so we have a long-running
collaboration with New Balance for the
past three years looking at sort of the
future of footwear and how 3d printing
and computation can be used to create
new types of performance Footwear can
you use 3d printing to make shoes that
perform and fit better towards this end
one of the projects we did early on was
designing these mid soles for running
shoes that are 3d printed and a TPU
rubbery material this is the only
project I'm showing tonight that uses
data most of the time our work is more
focused on interactivity but in this
project we're really looking at how can
you capture pressure data from mid soles
that are put in running shoes to look at
how different people apply pressure in
different areas of their foot as they're
running the slide okay we went so we
early on the project looked at many
different ways of translating this data
into volumetric structures so it could
be a 3d printed and sort of functionally
used as mid soles
sort of many different styles some of
which are more visual and some of which
are more functional the method that we
ended up going with for the shoes that
were released is treating variable
density and isotropic foam structures so
we're very inspired by the way cellular
structures in bone or wood respond to
different environmental conditions
during development to put more material
where more material is needed due to the
load we ended up creating views
customisable mid soles the one on the
left came from data of a person who
strikes on their mid foot so they always
land on the front of their foot the one
on the right was generated from data of
a person who consistently lands on their
heel and that yields these different
customized structures this is really an
ongoing collaboration looking at how we
can leverage 3d printing and computation
to change the way we make sneakers sort
of replacing mass production with
customized fabrication this is a tool
that we created for them that's intended
to be sort of a prototype for consumer
facing tool where people could load
their data in the store and then produce
a fully customized midsole in real time
we do a lot of work creating software
for other people like this I'm at the
last slide ok so hopefully you can see
some threads weaving through my series
of projects I showed you today I'm
thinking about kind of new opportunities
offered by digital fabrication ways of
using new technologies to engage more
people in the design process
thinking about how to reinterpret
traditional crafts and incorporate data
objects and also really confusing
puzzles think we have questions after
this I think I'm just gonna stop and
then people have any questions I'm happy
to answer them no matter how obscure so
thanks a lot
we don't just stand in darkness
anybody have any questions yes one brave
soul it does sort of produce sound I
didn't hook up anything that lets me
play audio but sounds like a little bit
like Legos but not as loud so it's it's
somewhat quiet but it does have like a
type of like seashells if you made like
a wind chime out of seashells or
something and sound like that it's not
something that we considered when
designing it but it is like something
that exists which I can describe poorly
I think it weighs three pounds well it
depends on which one it is the one with
the sort of scales on top of it weighs a
little bit more sort of comparable to
the weight of a wedding gown but more
than a t-shirt
we had we had Liam Young here a couple
years back and he showed a bunch of
stuff mind blowing stuff himself and one
of the points he made they had designed
a hoodie that could be worn to resist
lidar scanning which was really exciting
to see his kind of take on that but he
made a pretty interesting comment that I
want to see here your comment about his
comment that that things like that would
shift fashion out of like kind of
seasonal mutations if you will you know
kind of more of a consumerist pattern
into a stronger relationship with
technology and emerging technology and
different political attitudes about
technology right so lidar scan we want
to hide from that or we want to be seen
by that and I'm curious about your take
here because this is kind of a you know
not related really to what he was doing
but you know kind of nonetheless a
fascinating pairing for me
just thinking about fashion with respect
to technology and fashion with respect
to kind of market formation and taste
formation etc yeah that's the
interesting question I don't know if I
have a good answer to I think that in
general there's a kind of push not
towards what he's saying which may be
valid but towards just like slow fashion
in general so like buying fewer things
that are better made and I think sort of
return to the idea of customized fashion
like it used to be you'd go to shoemaker
and they'd make you a shoe and it would
fit you and you would use that shoe a
long time this is a high quality shoe
now we have this sort of you know supply
and demand there's like ample
manufacturing to make tons of new poor
quality things every month which are
then brought in and there's like yes a
huge like seasonal changeover of fashion
but I think that there are a lot of
people out there who are doing things to
return to a more like slower piece of of
making and consumption which I don't
know if it's in response to technology
in some ways it's like technology is
always around and has always been a part
of fashion and then making fabrics and
things so it's a sort of extension of
maybe our
cognizance of the impact on the
environment of white fast-fashion does
it's like a huge producer of waste and
materials yeah I don't really know about
the whole surveillance thing
surveillance is like here and everything
we do on our phones and computers is in
every database all the time and I don't
know how to resist that or if wearing a
special hoody is gonna make a difference
or not but maybe
thank you again I was curious about the
collaboration between the two of you and
whether you now both do everything or
there's still things that come from you
know your educational experience to be a
little bit specialized he loves math
math is his passion so he's definitely
more centered on sort of the initial
stages of development of a system and
the sort of architecture of that how
it's going to work I tend to come more
in and then figure out what are we gonna
do to the system developing sort of the
user interface or figuring out what it's
good for and then pushing it in that
direction but I do think that as the
years have gone by we both wear each
other's hats more and more often like
now he considers himself an artist and
designer where at the beginning he
didn't and now I'm have 10 years more
experience as a computer programmer than
I did at the beginning so it goes both
ways
do you think that maybe a new face would
be creating patterns based on human
actions so like thinking of more of like
a stretchy kind of like when you think
of stretchy fabrics almost like objects
that can both expand and contract yeah
that's that's definitely interesting I
think in terms of the garment production
and things that we do for unnamed shoe
companies there's a lot of thought and
like looking at the function of
different parts of the body and like
putting different structures in areas
that make sense for different types of
functions like if it's a part that needs
to be under compression versus a purse
that needs to flex more putting more
structures there if you're talking more
like actively like about expressive
wearables that move I would check out
the work of B nos for ahi she does
really cool stuff with wearable
architectures that are meant to express
sort of your emotions and move around
which is not what I do but there are
lots of cool people who are doing that
question here thanks for sharing your
work I can't help but think of
everything from Art Nouveau to Ernst
Haeckel in terms of the ways in which
nature finds expression in form my
question has to do with the way you're
emulating ecological models and looking
at nature for generating form and
sometimes nature fails can you give us
an example of something because you're
showing a great number of successes here
in which a system failed as can happen
within systems of nature in terms of it
I don't really have any exciting
examples I mean the basic answers things
fail all the time like the systems we
make the like 90% of the time they're
not working they're not doing what we
intend for them to do it takes like many
years to build a stable system that is
really unique and different and valuable
to work with you know just just basic
things like there's all sorts of
numerical errors which is not
interesting to you guys but that happen
when you're doing computational geometry
which yields towards buggy unstable
systems that explode or that
self-intersect
or crash your computer or whatever it is
do I have any interesting examples
though that's the question not I'll
think about it and maybe I'll think of
something that's interesting but
basically yes everything fails all the
time given your current production main
ways manufacturing for a project and you
like are you asking how many things we
make or what's the largest object that
you could probably produce oh the size
of the object itself not the quantity of
objects and I'm not I'm not very big at
all we don't have like a we don't have
large machinery in my studio since we
mostly are specialized on making objects
that we we can afford to make and other
people can afford to sell and we can
ship across the country we're pretty
specialized on small scale things we
have several like three laser cutters
that are twenty by thirty two and we
have a bunch of desktop 3d printers and
CNC router I mean we can't make very big
things with our own in-house stuff but
we have collaborated with other people
to do like architectural scale projects
but not within our own things that we
would fabricate in our studio I guess we
are working on a public sculpture for a
park in Somerville that's gonna be
pretty big but it's not going to be 3d
printed it's gonna be made of flat
riveted metal panels will be made sort
of in panels that are small and that are
painstakingly hand assembled into a
larger piece I don't know I think that
was your question probably yes okay
was there another person back there at
some point who didn't get to ask their
question I remember
the hand but now they're like I never
had my hand up yes what's what's on the
horizon for you like what's what's a
technique or a process that you're that
you'd love to develop but you haven't
had time to yet we're definitely
interested in doing a lot more with
ceramics both 3d printed ceramics and
traditional ceramics
we're also like I said we're working on
this large-scale sculpture project which
is much more about converting double
curved surfaces into panels and
reassembling them that we're sort of
doing with a new method from Kenan green
at CMU which is really exciting we have
one project that isn't published yet
that's about 3d printing living tissues
and designing sort of vascular networks
blood vessels that can be 3d printed to
support that which is really exciting
and then the other exciting thing is
we're moving our studio from Boston to
the Catskills so a lot of boring moving
and construction issues
um thank you for coming that was really
exciting you're very entrepreneurial and
the projects have you've shown and it
sounds like the studio was found there
pretty soon after you graduated maybe
I'm not maybe that's not correct but
it's not something that you had a
develop or like is there you know
something that we as students have
grabbed on to to be very proactive and
an innovative and in our ideas so
yeah we we started the studio and we're
still both in school so there's sort of
we're working on it over the January
period at MIT which is we don't have any
class fun and we weren't really doing it
to be entrepreneurial we're mostly just
doing it because I was doing this sort
of computational generative work in
architecture school and none of my
studio professors appreciated what I was
doing in any way it was like I was doing
terribly and everybody was like
computation should not be used for this
this is no good so it's sort of like an
outlet for taking the things I was doing
and translating them into something that
people actually did appreciate which
turned out to be jewelry and it just
kind of took off and people started
writing about it
partly because it was a good story like
MIT trained biologists makes laser-cut
jewelry so part of it it's just like
have have a project you can actually
pull off on your own like you don't need
investor money to do it and it's
small-scale enough that you can make it
a reality and it's good to have a good
story so people can get excited about
your work and understand it but yeah I
think we just kind of got lucky we were
doing the right thing at the right time
when these technologies were just
starting to pique people's attention and
partially we just got really lucky that
people were interested in our work and
we were able to sort of be self-funded
do do work make money take that money
make more work
 
