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Adaptive Traveler

The theme of this edition – ‘Adaptive Travelers’ – sums up the work of the selected international top talents and can thus be viewed as an emerging global trend. Inspired as always by the unstoppable inventive nature of mankind, this year the Modebelofte team noticed a focus on mobility and a longing for adventure. “Now that there is literally not a corner left in the world to discover, and mobility and migration are more often a of necessity rather than luxury, our autonomy is once again an important theme. This ‘up & go’ mindset turns designers into the true inventors that they are; they are designing the way we live tomorrow.”, say Niek Pulles (Heyniek) and Harm Rensink, who are, for the third year in a row , the curators and designers of the Modebelofte exhibition.

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Rapid liquid printing can produce large-scale objects out of high-grade materials like rubber, foam, or plastic in a matter of seconds or minutes by “drawing” them in a gel suspension. Traditional 3-D printing is restricted by slow speeds, scale constraints, and poor material quality, which makes it unreliable as a mainstream manufacturing process. With rapid liquid printing, manufacturing can be reimagined as an artistic experience unlimited by scale or gravity, asking us to rethink design, production, uniformity, and product life-cycles.

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Now a company called Modern Meadow says it can “biofabricate” leather without the rest of the cow. It does not quite grow cow skin, either; it grows a strain of yeast engineered to produce collagen, the protein in skin that gives leather its strength and stretch. Traditionally, making leather amounts to removing almost everything from skin (fat, hair, etc.) that isn’t collagen. Modern Meadow is basically skipping ahead. Once purified, pressed into sheets, and tanned, their vat-grown collagen becomes, essentially, leather.

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Jigsaw vs. Felts

Product designer Adam Blencowe took a jig saw—a wood-cutting tool—and replaced its blade with a set of needles and a 3D-printed foot. The saw itself is mounted on a movable CNC arm that's programmed to produce a pre-determined composition. Duroselle then pins the wool fiber into place for the machine to process. The needles on the saw move up and down very rapidly to produce the felted texture. It takes anywhere from 10 to 40 hours to felt the textile. 

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3D-printed Garments

At the University of Hertfordshire, a team of developers has created a prototype collection of wearable 3D printed clothing with their, potentially, revolutionary MODECLIX technology. The project is fully focused on creating printed textiles which possess similar qualities to cloth and the group behind the technology has successfully created a number of garments which are both wearable and customisable.

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MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, directed by Skylar Tibbets, industrial designers Christophe Guberan and Carlo Clopath, created the minimal, ‘active shoe’ by 3D printing extruded plastic, using fused deposition modeling, in specific patterns onto a stretched fabric base. Once the fabric is released from it’s stretched position, it then transforms into a secondary shape. In this case, that shape being a super minimal shoe.

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Project Jacquard and Soli

Put Jacquard and Soli next to each other and you start to see that maybe we don't have to be limited to touchscreens to interact with our gadgets. Maybe we can think about what they are and how we interact with them more broadly. 

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CLIP- Continuous Liquid Interface Production

UV light triggers photopolymerization and oxygen inhibits it. By carefully balancing the interaction of light and oxygen, CLIP continuously grows objects from a pool of resin.

CLIP moves beyond the limitations of 3D printing to offer unprecedented speed, quality, and choice.

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Artificial Skin

The researchers tuned the sensors to have the right stretching ranges depending where on a hand they’d be located. They used motion-capture cameras to study how a real hand moves and stretches, and then applied varying silicon shapes to different spots on the prosthetic skin to accommodate that stretchability.

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Artificial Muscle

Compared to human muscles, which only contract by about 20 percent of their starting length, these new muscles can contract by about 50 percent of their length. The artificial muscle’s activity is also reversible for millions of contraction and expansion cycles. In addition, they are roughly as strong and effective as more expensive actuators like those made of shape-memory alloys and polymers.

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Clothing 3D Printer

"A lot of the potential sustainability benefits that may come from this technology come from the elimination of a lot of intermediate steps," says Aaron Rowley, co-founder of Electroloom, the startup that created the 3-D printer. "We take raw materials and then convert them into a non-woven fabric in a single step."

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Future Tailoring - Couture With Personality

With Skin Graph’s underlining philosophy; that the individual must have a level of integrated authorship within the design process itself to truly create the bespoke. The result being a second skin where the nature of emotion and time is recorded as resonating patterns and cuts flexing and articulated with every move of the individual.

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Stretchable Electronics

In the future, a little bend in your smartphone might be considered a feature rather than a defect. An important component of future electronics that can be rolled up, folded or embedded in flexible objects is the stretchable conductor, which would make up components like wires and electrodes.

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The Chain Fountain

British science presenter Steve Mould, who made the experiment famous with a video that went viral on the Internet, explained the phenomenon as simply one of inertia: the falling chain has downward momentum, causing an upward momentum in beads leaving the pot. This, in turn, makes them leap before gravity can slowly reverse their momentum.

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Programmable Textiles

The translucent, lightweight, and malleable properties of textiles have been utilized for centuries in architecture, furniture, and apparel design. Typically, stretching fabric onto rigid structural frames requires complex molding and mechanical methods. By printing material in varied layer thicknesses onto stretched textiles, we are able to create self-transforming structures that reconfigure into pre-programmed shapes.

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Project Soli

Google is in the middle of developing a new interaction sensor using radar technology that can track movement accurately. It's only the size of a small computer chip and can be inserted into everyday objects and things we use daily. 

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Programmable Wood

Traditional wood-bending techniques require complex steaming equipment, labor-intensive forming processes, and a high degree of expertise. In addition, the natural pattern of wood grain and its physical properties make it difficult to curve into complex shapes. Novel printing and composite material technologies can now overcome prior limitations of wood forming. Flat sheets of custom printed wood composite can be designed to self-transform in controlled and unique ways.