Another product of Experimental Form. The Waveform Organizer is a desk shelf, the intersection of two sine waves which creates pockets and shelves to stash your things. The materials are a white ash ply and white acrylic bound with polished steel hardware to keep the acrylic suspended.

While this doesn’t hail from computation nearly as much as my other pieces in this class, I did put together a few small programs to help the composition and in order to print out working documents for working with in the shop.

Read on for detail images.
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An update on the global typography. I’ve filled in the western hemisphere, and extruded each country in respect to their population per sq. mile. Because the extrusions are essentially cone shaped, I’m actually extruding by the square root of the population per sq. mile. This also emphasizes the differences between most countries while making the sharp peaks not quite as harsh.

The result of printing…
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I’d like to share a work in progress. I’ve been tossing around ideas of what to do with our 3D printer, what might be interesting and engaging. I eventually arrived at this concept.

Each country is represented in their own language, the type creating the shape of the country, each done by hand. I hope that the hand-craft aesthetic of the type is an interesting juxtaposition with the process and material. Each country will be extruded outward a different distance, to correspond to some data set, such as population. Perhaps a series of these could account for multiple data sets.

This post is just to show the proof of concept. I’m working on a piece of software to generate the files to send to the 3D printer. Read on for how I’m doing this.

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This final semester I’m taking a course called Experimental Form: exploring form through mountains of sketches and ideation and a handful of creations. Half sculpture, half product design; the idea of this course is to create beautiful, personal objects of function.

I’m spinning the class by incorporating as many programmatic elements as possible: parametric form, force-directed layouts, mathematical constructs, and data-driven form. I think there is a powerful opportunity there to create unique and interesting things. In mass-produced situations, these objects could be individually and personally unique.

Our first project was a quick one: a day to generate a concept and a day to build and photograph a model. The concept was a fruit platter generated by a circle-packing program built around the constraints of the platter.

Click the image to play with the template generator: press space-bar to randomly generate circles, click empty space to make a new circle, drag around existing circles. Click hold & press ‘z’ to delete.

From this program I export PDF files which are sent to a laser cutter, therefore each platter is unique. Ideally this product would be made from CNC milled porcelain.

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