How could desktop 3D printing shift the industrial design landscape in the future?In search of answers Formlabs, the company behind the high-resolution Form 1+ 3D printer, partnered with Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London to explore the future of desktop manufacturing.
Formlabs was the first company to design and manufacture a high resolution desktop 3D printers. Using SLA technology, the Form 1+ 3D printer features a powerful laser that cures liquid resin, thus creating a tridimensional object with high accuracy and smooth surface finish.
The Form 1+ 3D printer is the perfect tool for engineers, product designers, artists and virtually anyone who needs to prototype their ideas. Highly used during product development, this 3D printer can also used to create products from scratches.
This is what Formlabs wanted to explore by partnering with the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London during a semester-long Industrial Design programme titled “Benchtop Factory”.
Led by Formlabs designer Yoav Reches and the RCA Senior Tutor James Tooze , this course produced a series of innovative products, all of which were designed by the students for the desktop Form 1+ 3D printer.
Some of the Form 1+ 3D printers used by the RCA students
The RCA students were empowered to create innovative and sophisticated products thanks to the possibilities offered by Formlabs’ 3D printing technology. The brief was about challenging the students to envision future benchtop manufacturing scenarios, and thinking about socio-cultural, political, technological changes to manufacturing.
Some of the students’ works include:
- Removing the need to remember by Thomas Leech, Joshua Browne, Axel Bluhme, Yun-Pei Hsiung.
Formkey is a unique 3-dimensional object which is the physical embodiment of a person’s online passwords. To access his account, a user can simply swipe the Formkey in front of your webcam.
- Memory Impression by Ivie Egonmwan, Clea Jentsch, Fiona O’Leary, Tomomi Ogata.
The main focus for this project was the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan. The designers discovered that survivors often returned to the disaster sites to recover whatever they could find. Memory Impression created a pattern-making model designed from these fragments found by the earthquake survivors.
- The Factory by Václav Mlynář and Pinja Maria Piira.
The Factory produces custom-made light fittings through a process of analogue material manipulation and parametric 3D computer models that are printed on demand.
- The Growing Lab by Alex Loudon, Micaella Pedros, Cristian Ferrara.
The growing lab is an experimental factory that prints growing vessels that evolve with the plants.
Formlabs was developed with the mission of helping designers and engineers create new ideas. Asthe world is trying to understand how 3D printing will change how products are made and manufactured, it’s incredible to see how design students are exploring new horizons on desktop 3D printers.
