Design Factory
Amar Gudhka
Brief 5 Design Museum
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Material Research
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Material Testing Newspaper Rolls Waterproofing
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Platonic Solids 28 Structure building 40 Construction 40 Testing 46 Instruction Manual 56
DESIGN FACTORY 2012/13: HAND MADE – HIGH TECH: materials, processes, exploration, adaptation In a world saturated with ‘stuff’ how do designers generate innovative and surprising solutions? What is the most important tool of the designer; the ability to look afresh and find inspiration and innovation from unusual and unexpected sources? An open and risk taking approach to the design process?There is of course no right answer and to quote Leonard Cohen: “If I knew where good ideas come from, I’d go there more often” The focus for year’s Design Factory is exploring and adapting unusual or unconventional materials and processes. Design Factory takes its inspiration from the multidisciplinary nominations and exhibits in the exhibition Designs of the Year. This year, we have worked with Attua Aparicio and Oscar Wanless from studio Silo whose design practice centres on experimentation with industrial materials and processes, adapting them to a more craft approach. Silo look at how industry makes things, trying to find a simpler and more expressive way, seeing new potential. The impetus of the project is to develop your engagement with the opportunity for risk taking and play afforded by the design process. Developing new processes and approaches which optimize or perhaps subvert materials and techniques often leads to the most innovative and exciting work. For many designers it is often the creative practice and process of design that gives rise to the most surprising and innovative results and ideas – play, risk taking, exploration and experimentation.
Paul Derrez, Pleated Collar Paul Derrez’s Pleated Collar is pure rational design with a human spirit. The simple folded pleats of this elegant solution twist and turn around the body, framing the face reminiscent of the large beautiful ruffs of seventeen century Dutch dress.
Camilla Prasch, Mega 1/7 Camilla Prasch uses ready-made materials to make extravagent jewellery. In her Mega series she attatches the simple snap fastner to white silicone discs to create a voluptuous ring. the white soft form follows the movements of its wearer, becaming alive when it is worn.
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Ron Arad, Not made by hand Not made by hand/ not made in China is created from “virtual prototypes”. It is based on a rapid prototyping system, which is used in fields such as car design, and allows a fast prototyping of parts. Rapid prototyping is a computer system in which a bespoke computer file is read by a select laser synthesiser and transformed into a 3D prototype. The jewellery produced with this system are either in polyamide, a material with a chalky cuttlefish quality, or in resin. “The beauty is that instead of a prototype made by a model maker which is never entirely accurate, with this system you can create a perfect prototype in one or two days.”
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“Oscar Lhermitte, a young designer studying at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, has fashioned a way to use some of the thousands of free newspapers that litter the capital’s streets. His new series, called ‘X day projects’, aims to create furniture from the mound of discarded papers without using other materials to stick them together, such as screws, nails, or glue. The first of the series to be released is the logically named ‘334’, after the number of newspapers used in its creation. It took only three pieces of metal to give the bench its shape and enough strength to support five people. Oscar Lhermitte claims it only cost him about £5 to make.”
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Newspaper House The Newspaper House was created in London’s Gillett Square, in March 2008, transforming over 85,000 used newspapers into a thought provoking artwork, attracting a wide range of people and press coverage internationally. Artists, residents, visitors, community organisations and schools were invited to participate by donating newspapers collected in and around the public realm and rolling them into sticks to build the house. The action of rolling the newspaper returns it to an almost natural state, close to its natural origin. Newspapers are then placed in a prescriptive order to create the foundation of the “House�. At each occasion, a new community, whose members become engaged in the process of creation, forms temporarily. Sumer Erek first built a shell-like structure, and then filled it from the inside. Lastly, Erek removed the mould to reveal a beautiful House made of newspapers.
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Ellis Stenman Almost 90 years ago, inventor and engineer Ellis Stenman of Rockport, Massachusetts set out to construct a summer home with thousands of recycled newspapers. Nowadays, his Paper House is not only a popular tourist attraction, but a monument to the ecofriendly lifestyle long before the term was even coined. He originally began constructing the house as a hobby in 1922, hoping to explore the insulating properties of newspaper, but as time went on it grew into much more than that. Eventually, Stenman began crafting chairs, tables, lamps, and even a piano out of rolled-up newspaper, held together by a glue he created himself out of flour, water, and apple peels.
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David Stowell Inspired to extend the ephemeral life of newspapers, David Stovell‘s Sunday Paper products consist of tightly rolled newspapers strapped together into stools. The pieces make smart use of dated headlines, creating complete pictures from carefully arranged rolls of paper. Stovewell’s simple yet beautifully effective Sunday papers explore the “compressed life cycle” of the material. They have a cultural and economic value, and that the same product has a different set of values by Monday morning, in that the news is old news and their value is for pulp.
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Charles Kasin Through a varied gluing process, Kaisin derived a way to create a beautiful honeycomb structure that is as strong as wood. The method is easy to replicate, giving way to mass production at minimal cost. The strategy behind his design was to reuse and recycle newspaper in a very visual way that makes people aware and respectful of environmental issues.
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Wenchuman laYOURs is a stool by Chilean designer Wenchuman that consists of four stainless steel rods and a stack of recycled paper. The rods form a sturdy base upon which magazine pages and newspapers are layered together to form a strong and sturdy seat. The design is simple and modern, and it inspires users to think about waste and reuse in new and creative ways.
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Mieke Meijer & Vij5 When thinking about wood and paper, wood is generally regarded as the sourse and paper the result. However the concept behind Meike Meijer’s project was to flip this theory and see paper as the source and wood as the end product. Meike envisioned an opportunity to upcycle the process and re-create wood, on the basis that there is so much paper as the end result of making newspapers. Mieke Meijer seeked the most practical way to re-create this and taking a stack of newspapers, he began glueing them one by one. By rolling it as tight as possible, it started to form through aggregation. This experiment proved to have some similarities to actual wood as it deformed and could be sandpapered. 15
Pykrete In 2009, the Discovery Channel program MythBusters tested the properties of pykrete and the myths behind it. They compared the mechanical properties of common ice, pykrete and a new material specially created for the show, dubbed “super pykrete�, using newspapers instead of woodpulp. Both versions of pykrete indeed proved to be much stronger than the chunk of ice, withstanding hundreds of pounds of weight. The super pykrete was much stronger than the original version. The MythBusters then built a full-size boat out of the super pykrete, and subjected it to real-world conditions. Though the boat managed to float and stay intact at speeds of up to 23 miles per hour (37 km/h), it quickly began to spring leaks as the boat slowly melted. After twenty minutes the boat was deteriorating, and the experiment was ended.
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Roll Construction Creating the newspaper rolls is a very simple process with two main steps: rolling the newspaper up and gluing the whole of the outside surface. To achieve a consistent thickness for all the rolls, each of them were made around a 6mm wooden dowel so that each of the rolls remained identical. Wallpaper paste was used to cover the outside surface as it dries clear, and gives the overall piece more structural strength compared to PVA glue.
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Triangular Pyramid Using the theory that a triangle is one of the strongest structures I created a triangular pyramid so that I could test the strength of both the shape and more importantly the material being used. Each of the rolls were held together using pins made out of newspaper, the hole at the ends of each piece being the ideal joint position.
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Strength Testing To test the strength of the triangular structure the best way was to add weight on the top of the structure and see if it was able to hold the weight without it getting damaged. I used some A4 books to test the strutural strength and it was able to hold the weight with ease, therefore backing up the theory of a trangle being a strong structural shape.
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Waterproofing Test To test whether the spray effectively made the paper waterproof or water resistant I submerged each of the test pieces into a tray of water for apporximately 1 minute. The control soaked up the water and once dired became very crinkled and lost its exiting shape. The paper that had been sprayed did not soak up the water, and although they slightly changed shape after drying they seem to be able to resist the water from damaging them.
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Waterproofing Test To attempt waterproofing for newspapers I found a spray called Crystal Clear that creats a transparent seal over the objects it is sprayed on. Although it doesnt say anything about paper being a viable material it was worth the try to enhance the materials properties. When I sprayed each of the sheets I noticed that the colour of the paper would slightly change and the surface would feel a bit rougher but did not change the material much. When testing, the control seems to soak all the water in and broke upart when i tried to remove it, whereas the sprayed paper seemed to repel the water and leave water droplets on the surface similar to other water resistant materials. 25
Newspaper Boats A fun way of testing out the waterproofing abilities of newspaper. The boats with the water resistant coating faired much better in the water than the non-resistant ones.
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Platonic Solids A Platonic solid is a regular, convex polyhedron. The faces are congruent, regular polygons, with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. There are exactly five solids which meet those criteria; each is named according to its number of faces. Platonic solids are vital in the geometry of space frames. A space frame or space structure is a truss-like, lightweight rigid structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. Space frames can be used to span large areas with few interior supports. Like the truss, a space frame is strong because of the inherent rigidity of the triangle; flexing loads (bending moments) are transmitted as tension and compression loads along the length of each strut.
Tetrahedron Faces: 4 Edges: 6 Vertices: 4
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Hexahedron (Cube) Faces: 6 Edges: 12 Vertices: 8
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Octahedron Faces: 8 Edges: 12 Vertices: 6
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Icosahedron Faces: 20 Edges: 30 Vertices: 12
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Tetrahedron Chain Several tetrahedron forms chained togethere to form a DNA like structure.
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Newspaper roll joining Testing different ways of joining each of the newspper tubes together. Using screws required drilling a hold through each tube joint, and although this didnt affect the material strength the tightening of the screws meant that the tubes became deformed at the roll ends.
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Joining newspaper rolls Using a smaller tube insde the original rolls as a join system faired much better than the use of screws. The joints were much stronger due to the lack of deformation at the corners, thus giving the overall structure increased strength.
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Sci-Tie, Sci Solutions Ltd There is a substantial gap in the market regarding biodegradable cable tie products. Current manufacturing techniques is holding this aspect of the design back. Biodegradable plastics do not flow as well as normal plastics in injection moulding and is preventing manufacture by this method. Sci-Tie’s design and method is the only one in the world capable of creating a biodeagradable cable tie on a mass production. Sci-Tie’s have many advantages over their non-biodegradable competition including the fact that the biodegradable cable tie that does not degrade until entering the soil, the ability to connect many together and to have a locking texture on both sides. 45
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Stellated Tetrahedron
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Pentakis Dodecahedron
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Strength Testing There is a substantial gap in the market regarding biodegradable cable tie products. Current manufacturing techniques is holding this aspect of the design back. Biodegradable plastics do not flow as well as normal plastics in injection moulding and is preventing manufacture by this method. Sci-Tie’s design and method is the only one in the world capable of creating a biodeagradable cable tie on a mass production. Sci-Tie’s have many advantages over their non-biodegradable competition including the fact that the biodegradable cable tie that does not degrade until entering the soil, the ability to connect many together and to have a locking texture on both sides. 54
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Instruction Manual The main theme behind all the structures is that anyone cab build them, and by having an instruction manual I wanted to show the simplicity behind construction these pieces.
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