MATTER Magazine Spring 2008

Volume 5.2 | A publication of Material ConneXionÂŽ | The leading global platform for material innovation and solutions | www.materialconnexion.com

US $5.00

the

design issue

BarberOsgerby A MATTER Interview

24 New Materials Generation .MGX Unleashing the Power of Rapid Prototyping Design Miami Cross-Pollination Breeds Innovation Material ConneXion Daegu to open in Korea

Welcome Volume 5.2

Executive Director

George M. Beylerian Editor in Chief

Richard J. Lombard Associate Editor

Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe Contributors

Andrew Dent, Ph.D. Richard J. Lombard Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe Graphic Design

Studio Dror Director of Publications

Michael LaGreca

MATTER, a quarterly publication, reaches over 30,000 professionals in diverse design fields and material development. For more information about the publication, or for advertising details, please contact: advertising@materialconnexion.com T +1 212 842 2050 Copyright ©Material ConneXion®, Inc. May 2008, Volume 5, Issue 2 MATTER Material ConneXion Inc. 127 West 25th Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10001 T +1 212 842 2050 F +1 212 842 1090 matter@materialconnexion.com

As spring arrives, we see the fruits of nature’s cross-pollination efforts all around us. In an economy driven by systemic innovation, new ideas arise from crosspollination – complex interactions between many individuals, organizations and environmental factors.

To face today’s challenges, one needs to incorporate a wide range of styles, skills, and perspectives.

Winning, innovative solutions are inspired and developed in crosspollination of ideas, rather than narrowly focused research.

Design cannot exist in a vacuum.

Today, it is difficult for one business or industry to have all the answers, but when you network across disciplines it facilitates the exchange of ideas between disciplines allowing one to learn about best practices in related industries, which in turn could be applied to one’s own. This not only broadens your perspective, it enables you to bring a more comprehensive solution to your patrons, clients, and customers rendering you much more valuable as a designer.

world, this season brings us fruits of dynamic collaborations from architecture and aerospace to the animation and automotive fields.

At the recent Salone and the upcoming ICFF, dazzling efforts are now bursting forth. While lamps bloom into flowers and furniture takes on kaleidoscopic colors, craft-based industries are expanding their horizons and CAD technology is blending with time-honored materials to create the seeds for one-of-a-kind mutations which bear earth-shattering Moreover, designers who are able effects. to match their technological developments with complementary We hope that the upcoming New expertise in other areas are more York Design Week will provide successful in realizing the full you with many opportunities for returns from their own technolo- cross-pollination. Go forth and gies and innovations. multiply!

Cross-pollination enables designers to communicate and work across several unique fields and this season is brimming with examples of this. In the design world, just like in the natural

George M. Beylerian Founder + President Material ConneXion® 5.2 Matter

Special to this Issue

06 ICFF Special: Materials Matter 24 Fabric Images Exhibition 32 MC Opening in Daegu

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Design Miami

BarberOsgerby

Harnessing the Power of Materials

A MATTER Interview

By Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

By Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

From drinking straws to titanium tea

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have

sets, spruce dresses and aluminum

been working together on products,

monuments, materials play an impor-

furniture and architectural interiors

tant part in stretching the boundaries

since the two met at the Royal College

of design. A panel talk at the recent

of Art in 1992. As they prepare to

Design Miami Conference, Material

debut their hand-machined, small-

ConneXion explores the work of three

batch anodized Iris Tables, the darlings

designers whose work spans the dis-

of the new British Modernism talk

ciplines of architecture, furniture and

about the impact that color, Formula

fashion and finds out that cross-pollina-

One race car manufacturing, and hand-

tion is the key to innovation.

skilled craftsmanship have on design.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Cover photo Š2008 Ben Moon

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Table of Contents

Regular Features

20 20

24 New Materials

03 Welcome 18 Best in Show 38 Material ConneXion International News

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34

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Generation .MGX

Competitive Conservation

Breakdown

Furniture in the Solar Decathlon

Biodegradable Plastics

By Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

By Richard J. Lombard

By Andrew Dent, Ph.D.

Coming of age at the same time as

The Solar Decathlon joins 20 college

The emerging field of bio-polymers

CAD technologies and materials

and university teams in a competition

allow us the chance to produce items

for solid freeform fabrication, a

to design, build, and operate the

from materials that will eventually

new generation of designers are

most attractive and energy-efficient

make their way back into the earth.

unleashing the power of Rapid

solar-powered house. This bi-annual

A new technology that directly grows

Prototyping. MATTER takes a look

competition invites these twenty

polymer granules inside the plant

at how the brightest of the class are

student teams to build full-sized

by fermenting the sugars within it

using these developments not just

model houses that reinforce the

creates biodegradable resins from

as tool for creating complex forms

message of conservation and

corn, potatoes, beets and other

or mass customization but also

demonstrate the possibilities of solar

food sources. MATTER’s material

as a commentary on sustainable

power. Focusing on the creation of

specialist examines this process and

manufacturing and as a medium for

“micro-environments” and multi-

its applications.

artistic expression.

functional pieces of furniture, Richard J. Lombard highlights the 2007 efforts of the New York Institute of Technology.

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Material Connexion® Expands Global Reach Material ConneXion Daegu to open in Daegu Material ConneXion, the leading global resource for material solutions and innovations, is expanding its global reach in Asia with the establishment of its fourth international licensee, this one in Daegu Metropolitan City, Korea. Scheduled to open in June 2008, it will occupy the third-floor of the newly built Daegu Gyeonbuk Design Center (DGDC), a twelve-story building dedicated to design and color. ”Material ConneXion Daegu will serve as a catalyst for the growth of Korea’s domestic material and design industry,” said Jung Yong Bin, President of DGDC. “It will also help the DGDC increase its presence on the global stage.”

“As one of the fastest growing design hubs in Asia, Daegu has become an important arena for the exchange and development of new ideas and processes,” stated George M. Beylerian, Founder and CEO of Material ConneXion. “We are excited to contribute our materials expertise,

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experience and resources to the region’s burgeoning design industry and look forward to the pivotal role Material ConneXion will play in the economic growth and cultural climate of Daegu and Korea beyond.”

Material ConneXion Daegu will offer the same services as the locations in Bangkok, Cologne, Milan and New York: An innovative materials library, consulting services—customized materials research, innovation alerts and materials trend reporting—plus a wide range of public programming, including exhibitions and conferences focused on materials innovation.

Daegu is a vital city in Southwestern Korea widely recognized as a center for textile manufacturing, high-tech fashion production, technology and design. Korea’s fourth largest city, it hosts five major universities.

Many of the 33,000 design students that graduate every year in Korea make their home in Daegu. Daegu’s recent campaign to position itself

as Korea’s Cultural Industry Core has sparked an exciting period of industrial transformation and regeneration. Colorful Daegu’, the city’s slogan, invokes images of the bright, vivid and energetic character of the region. Through a variety of events related to color, design, industry and culture, Daegu aims to become the international city of design and color.

Daegu’s strong textile and fashion industry has been established on its reputation for high quality products and unique designs. The city of Daegu is one of the central markets in the fields of textiles and textile machinery, and it is gaining full support of the textile machinery propulsion through a policy called “The Milano Project”. The Milano Project is aimed to nurture textile business in the Daegu area, making the center highly competitive to succeed in the global market environment in the 21st century. This national initiative, is intended to foster even greater success for Daegu’s fashion business by sup-

Seoul

Taegu

With New Location In Daegu, Korea Gyeonbuk Design Center in June 2008 porting development in design and textile machinery as well as apparel, yarn, fabrication, new fiber materials, synthetic fabrics and advanced dyeing technologies that include CAD applications, production sampling as well as film and design outputs.

The DGDC will play a large part in Daegu’s cultural industry expansion: In addition to Material ConneXion, the center will contain global design and color consulting businesses, multiple exhibition spaces, an IT center, and an event and conference hall. The DGDC foresees Material ConneXion will be the number one industrial design partner among large businesses in Korea.

“Our new location in Daegu will strengthen our capacity to help an existing global client base source materials and processes in East Asia,” stated Michele Caniato, President of Material ConneXion.

“It will allow us to provide innovative material solutions to the country’s booming design industry.”

Jung Youg Bin, President of DGDC, and George Beylerian

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Design Miami Harnessing the Power of Materials

by Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

Rainbow Chair by Tokujin Yoshioka

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Design Miami

When you dissect a work of innovative design - whether it’s architecture, a car or furniture - you basically find an interplay of three main components: form, technology, and materials. However, given the enormous time constraints in today’s world and demand for fast paced results, few designers have the time to really delve into the material technology and research that’s necessary to produce truly innovative work.

At Design Miami last December, Material ConneXion brought together a panel of practitioners to explore how designers could harness the power of materials. The panel included George Beylerian, founder and CEO of Material ConneXion, designer Tokujin Yoshioka (who was being honored as the 2007 Designer of the Year), and architects Greg Lynn, and David Adjaye. The discussion was moderated by Zoë Ryan, the Neville Bryan Curator of Design, Art Institute of Chicago.

Although they all work quite differently, each of them views materials as a driver of innovation and discovery.

Designer Tokujin Yoshioka’s work has an ethereal quality and is inspired by investigations into how materials perform under new circumstances. In contrast, architect Greg Lynn is noted for work driven by digital technologies: he makes amorphous forms, very often colored in very vivid hues.

Meanwhile, architect David Adjaye is interested in the relationship between the natural and the synthetic: his projects often incorporate industrial materials in innovative ways and are always very ingenious. The common denominator running through the work of all three practitioners is to provide an affective and tactile sensation though materials

while using them for their structural and formal qualities.

While Yoshioka is mainly known for extraordinarily hi-tech fashion accessories, his oeuvre also includes work that is made with materials that can be considered humble or ubiquitous, like tissues or precision packing materials. The diversity of this work leads one to wonder from whence he takes his point of departure and what attracts him to a particular material. For Yoshioka, design is not just about making something, it’s also about designing the feelings of the person who uses it. “If you look back in history,” He explains, “people originally made things only for themselves or for their community- people whose feelings they could understand intimately.”

The ideas for the installation he created for Design Miami came while getting a suntan on the beach during his first trip to the city. Yoshioka was impressed by the strength of the tropic sun and, still reeling from the recent weather images embedded in all of our collective conscience, he also had visions of storms and hurricanes hitting the area.

Employing visceral images of Floridian nature, he created two evocative gestures for the installation in his honor at Design Miami 2007.

The first is a chair made of prism glass, called Rainbow Chair. When placed in strong sunlight, the chair reflects intense beams of light and cast rays of rainbows about the room. The second concept, “Tornado,” uses two million plastic drinking straws to create the windswept scenery that served as a background for the other pieces in the installation and transports the visitor to an “Oz-like” environment of meticulous disarray.

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PANEChair by Tokujin Yoshioka

His Pane chair, made in 2006, touched another part of the designer’s psyche. “The concept of this chair evolved from an article that I had read in National Geographic. It mentioned fibers that are blown out like a spider’s web and spoke about the future of miraculous fibers from a scientific and technological angle. The moment I had set my eyes on the article, I had a firm vision of the future in my head. My idea of a structure of the future was, against common belief, not to secure strength using hard materials, but to systematically organize small fibers so as to gain strength by spreading the stress.”

The ingenious thing about this exercise is that the Pane chair goes through almost the same steps as baking bread (Pane means bread in Italian). A semi-cylindrical block of fibers is rolled, inserted into a paper tube and baked in a kiln at 104 degrees Celsius where the fibers memorize the shape of the chair. The small fibers organize themselves into a whole and gain strength by spreading the stress they are exposed to. The fiber itself forms the structural body for the chair and offers a unique seating experience that goes far beyond the conventional methods of making a chair.

“I wondered if I could create an entirely new type of chair in which the fiber itself is the structural body and which feels like sitting on air. After a good many trials and errors, I thought of a chair [whose construction] is uncertain until it has been baked in a kiln and named it after the food that undergoes a similar process.”

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Design Miami

David Adjaye and Boudicca's Spruce dress

Another innovative approach to furniture structure is seen in Greg Lynn’s bucket forms for the Ravioli Chair.

Ravioli comprises two half-shells made of different materials: An upholstered seat shell covered with threedimensional knitted spacer fabric is permanently affixed to the hard plastic shell of the base. Different versions of the chair are based on a series of textile covers in different colors and patterns, which Lynn also designed using digital technology.

“With the Ravioli chair, the very first conversations with Vitra were about wanting to do a bucket top (which had been done before), but also the equivalent of a bucket bottom that would do the work with the legs. We talked about how to do the base as a bucket, and the pros and cons of different materials. Metal would be squeaky and noisy and too light, we’d have to add weight. Fiberglass had enough weight and we could paint it.”

There is a lot of intuition at the beginning that one feels.

A designer needs to know what he or she wants to get out of the material and then push it in a new direction.

“With the Raviolis, it was really the technology of the materials that was satisfying a desire we had, and then we had to bring the two things together. But you can’t really ever start with a material with no desire and you

also can’t just have whimsical ideas and look for a new material. It’s got to be the two things at once. “ For Lynn, the key to material innovations is the crosspollination of disciplines. He likens his practice to those that existed during the era of post-war industry. “In the late 1940s and 50s there was a lot of materials work being done by the military, the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, architecture, and furniture.” It was a rare time when each field shared a common vocabulary which stimulated evolution and progress into cross-disciplinary efforts. “Back then, architecture, furniture and industrial design, could communicate between themselves in a common language. Today, I’ve always wanted to get the vocabulary of architecture back to the level where it can talk to contemporary automobile, furniture or fashion practices. I think it’s primarily materials and processes that let’s all these things talk to each other and manufacturers are very focused on that. They’re really looking at these industries and trying to find ways to work with them. “ For the Alessi Tea and Coffee tower, I wanted to do superform titanium and we found three aerospace titanium manufacturers just by looking in the Yellow Pages.

Ravioli Chair by Greg Lynn

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Design Miami

David Adjaye's pavilion in front of Oslo's Peace Centre

David Adjaye also thrives on unusual collaborative strategies. His collaboration with UK clothing label Boudicca became more of a sculpture enmeshing, originating from the human figure. Commissioned by UK Vogue, the results fused body and structure in an environment created from sustainable spruce timber. This moves past the idea of fashion as clothing, to a conceptual idea of fabric as a very close environment that walks with a person and envelopes them.

“For me, an essential part of the creative process is what I call ‘co-authoring strategies,’ where you bring varied but like-minded expertise together in order to really discover something that neither of you knew. The fashion relationship is not really about the difference between fashion and architecture, but rather I actually see architecture very much as a kind of textile strategy, something that is quite close to the body and also something which has structure, essentially which makes different degrees of densities. So I like to collaborate with people that also think of fashion beyond these traditional ideas about clothing.”

For Adjaye, architecture is about knowing the appropriate kind of materiality that will illuminate the ideological strategy behind the project. ”If the work is about elucidating an idea, I want to deploy materials which confirm, reinforce, and actually clarify it. I don’t want to just use materials because of their performance or use materials because they’re nice or pretty or cute or whatever.

It’s a way of trying to find an ethical position in terms of aesthetics or process.”

The best example of this is the Pavilion in front of the Nobel Peace Museum in Oslo, Norway. Located in a conservation area, it’s one of the few buildings that wasn’t bombed in the war, so it had a very highly emotional content for the community. Adjaye chose to create the structure in aluminum for two reasons: the first was to

represent the amazing, but unseen aluminum industries in Norway; and the second was because he wanted to use a product that would age gracefully in Oslo’s squally climes.

“Aluminum corrodes, but in a crystalline way. And aluminum was the only material that would allow us to do this.

If it was done in steel, it would be incredibly problematic in terms of coatings. If it was done in COR-TEN, since it’s a public realm project, we’d have to work on drainage systems. So in a way, aluminum was the natural material because it would crystallize and form a white, opaque, self-protective coating. It would capture and reflect more light, and would not cause us to create massive foundations underneath the pavement.”

This last issue was vitally important, because the space outside the museum was public space and the Nobel organization had to negotiate with the city to build something there. As with most conservation-listed projects, Adjaye had the arduous task of renovating a building without altering the exterior. “I wanted to try and address a more symbiotic relationship where you bring things closer and closer. The first introduction to [the Peace Center] is this aluminum portal as a way of saying you are “going in” without going through the front door: a gateway, a sign in lieu of signage on the building which signifies that you’ve passed into something new.”

Much in the same way that Adjaye’s portal creates a transformative experience in Oslo – and wherever the structure travels (it is mobile and taken by the Nobel Organization to represent them wherever they go) – so too do materials create a transformative environment.

All of the design disciplines, from fashion to furniture to architecture, speak the language of materials and can pass their inspiration and discovery from one to another.

This education translates to greater innovation and, ultimately, better designs and products for all of us.

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by Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

Interview with

BarberOsgerby

Known for iconic modern work, many of their furniture pieces can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2001, Barber Osgerby founded Universal Design Studio to execute architectural and interior design projects, which have included Pharmacy, the west London restaurant, and flagship stores for Stella McCartney.

Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe Your press release states that color is a very important component of a designed object. Can you talk a bit about the experience of using, and selecting, color in your Pantone project at ICFF in 2005?

Edward Barber Usually when we’re designing a project, a piece of furniture or a product you spend 99 percent of the time designing the form and the function, working on the functional aspect, material selection, and the color becomes the final thing. But what we wanted to do with this project was just start with color and then design pieces to work with these color ranges that we’d selected. The Pantone Stool has a flat side panel which is the same proportions as the pull out color chips produced by Pantone.

DDB How did you approach color when designing the Iris Table range?

Did materials and processes (anodizing vs. coating) play an important part in realization of the Iris tables?

EB We work with so many different types of color selections, fabric samples and paint samples—and we’ve always wanted to work with these anodized coatings.

They’ve got such an incredible range, and the great thing about the anodizing is you can see the material through it. It’s not just a paint finish. If you take a bright red paint, you can put it on wood, or metal, or plastic and it looks the same, whereas with anodizing you

PORTRAIT Heiko Prigge for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby have worked together since meeting as students at the Royal College of Art in 1992.

One of their first collaborative projects was the Loop Table, a deceptively simple coffee table with a birch ply top looping around the base, which was produced first by Isokon Plus in the UK, then

by Cappellini in Italy. In addition to designing for these two furniture manufacturers, they have also developed products for Authentics, Levi Strauss and Magis as well as working on conceptual projects for Dornbracht and Abet Laminati.

BarberOsgerby

get this amazing iridescence that comes from the actual material itself.

Jay Osgerby When we set out to put these pieces together, we didn’t really follow any scientific method for putting the colors next to one another or even applying them to the forms, which we designed for them. Rather, it was done as a kind of compositional approach, more like painting than science. So we spent many weeks with different color chips of anodizing and we just moved them round and round and round, changing the adjacencies to see how they work with one another, and then tried through renderings to match to the shapes that we’ve designed for each of the tables.

single color of one of the segments of these tables it varies dramatically in tone depending on how it’s lit and its adjacency to other ones, so the smallest change of a radius on the inside of the table has quite profound effect overall on the way the whole piece looks. So it’s been a real challenge, getting everything right. And then, once you feel that you’ve got something which is absolutely spot on, then you’re at the mercy of the chemical process itself, which is not empirical. It’s not like a powder coating which

takes pieces of aluminum and dips it in color and that’s that. This is more like a photographic process where you’re using chemicals and temperature and time— EB And strengths of dyes as well.

JO So even though you have a particular green in mind, that might have been set down as one of 250 colors, once the piece comes out of the bath, if the bath is .5 of a degree centigrade hotter or cooler, it will be a different color. It’s real alchemy.

DDB Did you make the changes in the colors or the adjacencies based on these forms?

JO Absolutely. One of the hardest things with this project has been the integration of the tonal variation and the subtle changes in the profile of each of these sections to modify the way that light falls on them, the way that the anodizing varies tonally within its own. On a 5.2 Matter

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Interview

EB Also, a couple of the pieces have a very, very gradual phase of color so that each segment is a minute degree of the same color but slightly lighter or darker and that is again, proving very difficult to achieve.

DDB Can you talk about the precision manufacturing and handfinishing techniques used on the Iris Table Range?

JO Yes, actually. We’re quite fortunate here in England to have quite a lot of Formula One motor racing manufacturing, quite small workshops where there are a series of five axis CNC machines which are used for making tools, and this gives us the ability to create extraordinarily complicated forms with absolute precision, -micron precision, and that’s really what’s enabled this project to happen. Once these tables are assembled, they actually look like extraordinarily simple forms.

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But when you take the whole thing to pieces, you can see that there’s a real intricacy. There are three different types of segments and there are various different ways that the whole thing can be assembled. All of that’s machined here in England with the racing team toolmakers.

EB The great thing about working with the guys that produced [these pieces], is that the people who actually produced it are so used to working with extreme detail and skill. They can hand beat a car body panel that’s sculpturally about as refined as anything really. It has to be absolutely perfect. So these guys know exactly what is required from our drawings. And it’s just an amazing process to think that people still have the skills these days, I mean when there’s so much computeraided design, that these guys still, by hand, can take a sheet of aluminum,

or a sheet of stainless steel, which is more difficult to work, and actually shape it perfectly to the designs that we’ve made on the computer.

JO One other thing to add to that, is that there’s this color dichotomy between the five axis CNC machining and then the hand finishing, which I didn’t really talk about, but which of course is completely done by eye.

These pieces that come out of the machine are then fettled by hand before they’re being anodized, and the anodizing, although we’ve always imagined it to be a heavily industrial process, is very much more of a craft process, almost an art process.

DDB How did the collaboration with the automotive industry come about?

JO Well initially, the first couple of Zero-In end tables were produced by the Aston Martin Restoration Company, but then I suppose as

BarberOsgerby demand rose for the edition, we had to find someone who was a slightly bigger company. And that was quite simply a question of researching the Midlands really, where all of our vehicle industry has been in up to the ‘90s, and we found a specialist panel-working company in Coventry.

EB Although the first ones that came to market were made out of plastic, the prototypes were handmade by these panel beaters because it was the only way we could actually achieve that shape before actually committing to spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on tools. So actually that was really our first port of call for that table.

DDB In a culture known for its love of tradition, there seems to be a rather strong association between craft and design, whereas here in America there is a sharp distinction between craft being a one-off, and design being massed produced.

EB Yeah, I think “designer-maker” is something that there is a lot of in this country. Craft is a lot of that as well but it’s a separate thing. I mean most people coming out of design school now who trained in product design or furniture design, they tend to sort of home-produce – well not homeproduce but in their studios produce pieces after graduating, rather than going to work for a big company. It seems that almost everyone has a go at producing their own stuff, so maybe what we call designer-maker may actually be called craft.

JO Yeah, I think the word “craft” is a little bit out of date now. It’s a very loaded word. But there isn’t much of a word to replace it. There are a lot of very skilled craftspeople in this country who produce things at an industrial level that is still quite small.

For example the [British] automobile industry is still a craftsman industry.

Because in the development of the car they use ceramics, and clay mod-

els and apart from the final car that you actually buy from the garage, everything else along the way has been done by craftsmen really.

DDB It seems a lot of your furniture commissions for historic buildings aim to create modern elements that compliment older movements from the modernist style to arts and crafts and as far back as the Norman period. Is this an extension of the British love for tradition or in contrast to it?

EB We’ve done three commissions for various sorts of establishments: the Royal Institute of British Architects, the De La Warr Pavilion and the St. Thomas Cathedral in Portsmouth, and I would say that the Portsmouth Bench is the only one that doesn’t reference the building in any way.

It’s more referential to a sort of spirituality, a kind of simplicity and honesty in its shape. The RIBA desk doesn’t actually relate to the building itself at all. Possibly in its material choice, the fact that it’s black glass and polished metal maybe harks back a little bit to the period of the ‘30s when the building was first commissioned, but in terms of its design it doesn’t reference the building at all.

The only time where we have done that is the Delaware Pavilion where we went down to see the building and looked at it in great detail, actually.

We've referenced details from the building, like the handrail details from the staircase and the doors and translated that into the chair, almost quite literally. But that chair really felt like it had to belong in that building to us, whereas the RIBA desk, you go in there and it clearly feels good in there, but it’s absolutely nothing to do with the architecture of the building. It sort of works somehow against it, but somehow because of that it feels comfortable.

your work and the context of these places?

JO It’s a combination of different things. I suppose you could say that the materials of the bench have to do with the Cathedral I suppose, but on the other hand, you could also say that some of the construction detailing was a common factor because the construction details are a thousand years old, so it could have been done at the same time. And with the RIBA desk, the materials are almost right, but actually again, it’s more about the fact that when the RIBA building was commissioned, it was lavished with craft and the handmade approach as well as using quite luxurious materials. So again, it talks about not just the materials that we’ve chosen, but also the way in which the thing was made, which compliments the space in which it’s been put.

DDB Would you say it’s the materials that actually for the link between 5.2 Matter

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Contact information for the manufacturers of the materials on these pages is available in Material ConneXion’s online database, materialconnexion.com.

For information on how to become a subscriber, e-mail us at access@materialconnexion.com.

Best IN Show Once a month, an interdisciplinary team of experts from a variety of design related fields, come together to select new materials for the library.

Out of the over forty materials juried monthly, one is chosen as the Best in Show. Model materials are innovative, eco-friendly, technologically advanced, and have many possible applications.

Here we have highlighted three of the most recent Best in Show materials.

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Cool dark textiles

metal fabrics

A coating process that reduces the heat developed from absorption by enabling dark textiles to reflect 100% of Infrared Radiation, (invisible to the eye), without affecting the visible spectrum color of a textile. This finish is applied during the dyeing process and may be combined with the company’s other performance technologies such as self-cleaning, stain-repellent, abrasion-resistant, moisture-wicking and quick-drying finishes. Available in stretch and non-stretch wool and nylon woven fabrics including dynatec high-tensile protective, dynamic multipurpose, prestige two-waystretch and dryskin performance soft-shell fabrics, it complies with the bluesignŽ environmental health and safety standard and is used for outdoor apparel.

Woven fabrics that use metal yarns as the weft. These polyurethane (PU; 16%) coated copper (74%), and silk (10%) fabrics are sold 1450 mm (57.1 in) wide in continuous lengths. Two standard check patterns are available; black on black, or black on silver.

The fabrics are fully flexible only in one direction and have a weight of 1.2 kg per linear meter.

They are stain resistant, non-flammable and anti-static. They find application as room dividers, as furniture fabric, as wall coverings and as fashion and accessory materials, as well as costumes for theater and film.

process MC# 0139-11

metal MC# 6159-01

Best in Show

wooden fabrics natural MC# 6046-04

Flexible, elastic, translucent wood veneer strips that are produced from several cedar species, which are dyed using organic pigments and may be sewn, glued, folded and used like a standard silk textile.

Depending upon weight and design, the fabrics are relatively tear resistant and may be hand washed. Color, thickness and weight vary with customization.

Standard widths are 900 mm (35.4 in) and the surfaces are coated with a thin protective clear polyurethane (PU) layer.

Patterns and logo designs may also be customized. Applications are for shoe upholstery, teddy bear fur, roll screens, cloth bags, and other high end textile applications.

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24 new materials

MC# 0162-04 Metal mesh screens for interior and exterior use. These rigid meshes are constructed from woven stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum, bronze and copper. They have open area from 0 to 61% and weights from 0.9 to 3.75 lbs/sqft. The manufacturer offers 23 standard designs (some suitable for use as infill panels) while custom designs are subject to a minimum. Applications are for all architectural screening.

MC# 4438-08 Metallic look drapery textile that may be shaped and formed by hand. This two layer 59% polyester, 41% metal blend translucent fabric is woven 59 in (1499 mm) wide. It is available in four colorways, it has a maximum shrinkage of 1% and may be machine washed or dry cleaned. According to ASTM E-84, it has class A fire retardance. It has a repeat of 950 mm (37.4 in) and is suitable for use in commercial and residential interiors.

MC# 5827-02 A family of bio based polymer composites. These ‘Biopolyolefins’ replace 50% or more of the fossil-fuel content used in traditional plastic resins with bio-based materials such as starches from corn, tapioca, wheat, and potatoes. With nearly the same physical characteristics and price point as traditional polyolefins, these hybrid resins are pitched as a way for plastic processors to reduce their reliance on petroleum or natural-gas based resins. Applications are for existing PP uses.

MC# 6138-01 Carbon fiber tapes that have exceptionally thin cross sections. Using a novel spreading technology, the tapes are produced in weights as low as 80 g/m2 but with even thicker tows (>12k). Available as ‘dry’ tapes (with no resin) or as pre-impregnated forms with compatible thermoset resins added. No thermoplastic stabilizer needs to be introduced. The tapes are used in aerospace, automotive (sports car bodies), sporting goods (canoes, kayaks, ski blades) and industrial applications (wind turbine blades).

MC# 6142-01 Nonwoven fabrics that may be easily heat press molded (thermoformed). These spunbonded polyester sheets are lightweight, tear resistant and exhibit excellent formability by deep drawing. This binder-free, easily printable fabric has some degree of shape memory at temperatures above 50°C and excellent liquid and air permeability. A range of versions are available in thicknesses that have different tensile strengths and breaking elongations up to 280%. Potential applications include molded filters, plant pots and air permeable containers.

MC# 6149-01 Offering a more sustainable alternative to some molded plastics, leather fiber-reinforced biopolymer resins are now available for various potential applications. The parts have a warm, leather-like feel, low shrinkage, good acoustic and vibration dampening properties, and a highly accurate surface resolution. Products can be molded with 10% to 70% leather by weight and the material can be foamed. The molded parts may be used in place of other injection molded pieces.

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24 New Materials

MC# 6137-01 A family of masterbatch colorants for use in biodegradable and compostable resins. The pigments are based upon natural sources, mainly plants, and are both biodegradable and renewable. Predominantly, the colorants offered for use with biopolymers have been conventional, synthetic materials usually made from fossil fuels. Available colors include red, orange, yellow and green, with blue in the final stages of development. The pigments may be added to molded packaging products from both synthetic and natural plastics.

MC# 6148-01 This is a family of permanent protective coatings that provides glass with an exceptional scratch resistance of over 10 times that of tempered and chemically strengthened glass.

The technology uses a patented, diamond-like carbon deposition on on clear glass and is sold in thicknesses ranging from 1.7 mm to 12 mm.In addition to being exceptionally scratch resistant, the panes are chemically inert, low maintenance, and do not reduce the optical clarity of the underlying glazing. It finds applications in transportation, store fixtures and display cases, custom tabletops, furniture and for vending machines.

MC# 2277-05 Expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) high performance fiber and threads with up to 50% greater tensile performance and lower shrinkage than conventional matrix-spun PTFE fiber.

This allows for the use of lower denier fiber for the same performance resulting in up to a 50% weight reduction in some applications and provides improved shock resilience with less breakage than other sewing threads. Available in a wide range of colors including flat and round “staple” fiber, and sewing thread. Applications are for filtration, marine awnings/sewing threads, bearings, gaskets, and dental floss.

MC# 2499-04 ‘Skin-friendly’ fabrics woven from environmentally sound Tencel® fibers, which are made from renewable sources of wood. The fibers are completely biodegradable and exhibit high strength in both wet and dry conditions. Smooth fiber surface, the thermal regulation and high moisture absorption support a positive skin climate. Fabrics for undergarments and outerwear are made from 100% Tencel or mixed with cotton to create silky yet study clothing that is sweat absorbing, washable, and vapor permeable.

MC# 5401-02 Freeze indicator labels for temperature sensitive commodities. These flat laminated pouches are layers of polymers that protect the red indicator fluid from evaporation over time. These labels address the problem of accidental freezing of products such as vaccines, protein based drugs, inks, electronic components, paint and dairy that have undergone a ‘freeze-thaw’ cycle during transit or storage which would render them ineffective. Applications in temperaturesensitive material transport and storage.

MC# 5812-02 Leather hides that have been custom slit to create a unique surface effect. These drum dyed hides are processed by cutting the surface on a very fine scale (approximately 0.3 mm wide spacing), giving the surface a ‘mushroom gill’ appearance which is relatively durable. The hides reach a maximum or 1.5 to 2 m (60 to 78 in) in length and are available in a range of solid and metallic colors. Custom colors are available with a minimum order.

They find application as apparel, footwear, accessories, book binding, watch bands and for interior surfaces.

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24 New Materials

MC# 6068-04 High-quality fabrics and films that are decorated with tiny round and honed glass crystals in various colors and effects. The material is sold per meter and available in rolls of various widths and lengths in black, silver, gold, antique gold & silver, and clear.

The films can be stitched, cut and adhered as hot-fix (under pressure and heat). The material is lightweight, tear-resistant, machine washable or can be dry-cleaned. It is Öko-Tex Standard 100 certified. Applications are for shoes, apparel, accessories, jewelry, packaging and interior design.

MC# 6150-01 This injection-molding granulate consists of cellulose fibers from field grass (50%), polyethylene or polypropylene (47%) and bonding agents (3%).. The granulates can be dyed with any color pigment, they are free flowing and can be used with any injection-molding machine to produce parts like spoons, consoles, suitcases and protective caps. Due to the excellent flowability, high cycle times are possible even for complex forms. Parts made from this granulate are up to 20% lighter in weight than the same parts made from 100% polyethylene or polypropylene.

MC# 6152-01 This patented technology which enables large slides to be permanently incorporated in layers of laminated safety glass. Components are assembled with clamp fixtures and further processed with acid-free silicone. According to the Ilford-tests, the material remains lightfast in direct indoor sunlight for 25–30 years. Various thicknesses and configurations (transparent, translucent and opaque) can be produced with a maximum pane size of 1250 x 2800 mm. Applications are for photo archiving in museums, institutes and public institutions and custom, to-order for architecture, interior design and art in construction.

MC# 6154-01 Decorative, kiln-formed glass with specific honeycomb and wave patterns. Glass strips are preformed and then fused at 900°C. The honey comb glass is made by fusing optical glass rods and colorful ARTISTA® glass that is polished both by hand and in a furnace, to create color gradients. Available in 4 different colors and 3 finishes. Custom colors and thicknesses are available per request. The maximum panel size is 1.20 x 3.50m x 15mm thick and customizable within this frame. Current applications are for interior and exterior decoration, dividers, vanities, sinks, lighting, runways, and wall and floor tiles.

MC# 0119-02 Translucent honeycomb panel that and is traditionally used as core material in sandwich panels for decorative applications. The honeycomb core consists of randomly arranged polycarbonate tubes that absorb sound and vibration. The material complies with the RoHS directive, is corrosion resistant, non-conductive and also recyclable, chemical and water resistant. Available in transparent, gray-blue and white tubes, with custom colors are possible.Applications are for interior design like room dividers, tabletops, visual sandwich panels as well as privacy screen (installed between 2 glass panels).

MC# 6180-01 Molded polymer profiles for packaging objects from 10 ounces to 75 lbs that utilize 100% post consumer waste and provide lower cost alternatives to PU, PE and PP foams (and comparable to EPS foams). The profiles can be molded into complex forms which are lightweight, can be stacked (can save storage space up to 85%), and consistently exceed ISRA drop specifications. Applications are for packaging products sensitive electronic equipment such as computers, printers, and mobile phones.

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Contact information for the manufacturers of the materials on these pages is available in Material ConneXion’s online database, materialconnexion.com.

For information on how to become a subscriber, e-mail us at access@materialconnexion.com.

MC# 3077-03 Interference effect glitter pigments for addition to paints and plastics with the ability to exhibit a wide range of hues when viewed at different angles. The glitter is a polyester (PET) flake with aluminum, chromium, silicon dioxide and magnesium fluoride, supplied as a 0.006 in hexagon-shaped cut flakes, in Red/Gold, Gold/Silver, Green/Purple, Blue/Red. The pigments are easy to apply, sand and repair and can be combined with conventional pigments for custom colors.

May be added to paints, coatings, plastics and textiles for fashion, accessories, consumer products, automotive and packaging.

MC# 5641-03 100% PP woven textile which creates a polypropylene tape yarn with a highly-drawn core for strength properties within a lower melt polymer matrix for composite processing.

Based on the patent-pending PURE technology, this stiff thermoplastic composite is fully recyclable, has good impact resistance and stiffness, and is safer to handle than glass-filled composites. Available in white, black and gray fabric or sheet stock. It can be painted in-mold or post-mold. Intended for panel or molded applications such as transportation, water sports, construction, consumer products, and ballistics.

MC# 6174-02 Ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVA) foam made from recycled post-industrial shoe insole waste. This foam is produced from the waste generated during cutting by separating the EVA from the textile and grinding it into pellets, which are then expanded to produce the final product. The foams may be formed into sheets or molded to product custom shapes. They are available in a standard range of thicknesses (between 3-8mm), but can be made to other dimensions for custom projects. Applications include room/wall dividers, packaging, footwear, and consumer products.

MC# 6172-01 This wood fiber composite (WPC) consists of natural wood fibers (50 to 75%) and a thermoplastic resin (25 to 50% PP or PE). Fresh wood fibers from different types of wood can be used. The WPC compounds are custom produced and offered as granulates or pellets with various wood fiber contents and wood fiber sizes. The light beige to brown granulate can be processed by extrusion, pressing and injection molding. The color can be varied by the means of pigment mixtures, whereas the high wood fiber content gives the end product a wood-like surface texture. Applications are for products for interior and exterior applications.

MC# 6168-01 Flax-reinforced polymer granulate that consists of 20-50% flax fibers in combination with polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE), polyamide (PA) or matrix type biopolymers (e.g. PLA). In comparison to fiber-glass reinforced synthetics, they have a lower specific weight, exhibit less shrinkage during injection molding, and exhibit a good impact strength at low temperatures. Available in custom colors depending on the compound type and amount. Applications are for extrusion and injection molded products like automotive parts, machine part covers, housewares, lightweight honeycomb structures as well as sports equipment, and furniture.

MC# 6146-01 A process for the creation of bi-color blow molded shapes. This co-extrusion of high density polyethylene (HDPE) is a proprietary technology that can produce a range of bottle sizes, neck finishes and shapes, including rounds, ovals and flat-sided shapes.

Available in a full range of color choices, with the ability to introduce two colors as stripes of equal or varying width. Currently only available for polyethylene, the process is used for cosmetic packaging.soft-shell fabrics, it complies with the bluesignÂŽ environmental health and safety standard and is used for outdoor apparel.

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Alkemi

Conrete Works

Award winning Alkemi is a SCS certified, LEED credits receiving, recycled surface material composed of post-industrial scrap waste (35% by weight—as certified—or 60% by volume). Made from fine flake aluminum milling scrap—which commonly burns up as a heavy smoke pollutant when exposed to conventional aluminum recycling—Alkemi leaves no hazardous footprint.

Concrete Works is a bi-coastal design and fabrication firm specializing in the craft of concrete.

Established in 1991 by architectural designer Mark Rogero, Concreteworks has earned a reputation for beautifully refined handcrafted, custom pre-cast products, which have found applications in both interior and exterior projects throughout the US.

Available in a variety of colors and surface treatments (Textured & Classic and Honed), Alkemi may be fabricated and installed using standard solid surface fabrication methods. Strong, durable and exquisite to the eye, Alkemi offers a brilliant, sustainable alternative to the stagnant commercial options, such as solid surface, plastic laminate, stone and glass.

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Concreteworks has brought together the rigor of invention, the sensuality of architecture and a passion for craftsmanship to develop a unique proprietary casting process that enables new and limitless possibilities for an age-old material.

Concreteworks’ commitment to research development of new concrete technologies and experience with architects, designers, and clients is the foundation of our handcrafted process-providing customized unique pieces.

ICFF Special: Materials Matter

DuPont™ Corian®

Josh Urso Design

You might know Corian® as the original countertop material, but at ICFF, Corian® proves to be the designer’s material, lighting up the show with its new Illumination Series. This new collection features five translucent colors, Mint Ice, Strawberry Ice, Lime Ice, Glacier Ice and Blueberry Ice – giving designers the freedom to create with the most dynamic design element of all – light.

Josh Urso Design (est. 2002) is a contemporary furniture and lighting design studio that bridges the design and art worlds. Their line of products and custom designs are composed of resin impregnated fabrics and other materials. Through the use of this process, their pieces achieve both sculptural impact and functional use. Experimentation with their materials and processes has led them to create a wide range of products and conceptual pieces suitable for both the residential and commercial setting.

Designed by Morris Sato Studio and fabricated by Evans & Paul, the booth underscores the endless design possibilities of Corian®, showcasing the interaction of the material with light and technology.

CeeLite™, the flat flexible lightbulb, turns the CNC cut and thermoformed translucent double-curved booth panels into a light source. This advanced Light Emitting Capacitor (LEC) provides flawless surface illumination and highlights the translucent qualities of Corian®.

Additionally, DuPont unveils the Terra Collection, providing architects and designers with pre-consumer recycled content surfacing solutions to meet their design needs. The Corian® Terra Collection consists of 25 colors certified by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS).The Zodiaq® Terra Collection features four colors, Calm Springs, Warm Taupe, Moroccan Morning and Mossy Green that contain at least 50 percent pre-consumer recycled glass.

Currently in their line is Knoop, a resin impregnated rope coffee table that utilizes their unique technique to combine the fluidity of a drawn line with geometric structure. Also available is Puff, a dynamic lighting fixture that provides an exciting alternative to other pendent fixtures on the market. These, along with their other products, demonstrate the capabilities of the materials that Josh Urso Design typically uses.

While they do produce a line of furniture and lighting in a range of pre-selected fabrics, materials, and colors, Josh Urso Design enjoys working on custom designs with custom-selected materials and site specificity in mind. Corporate installations and largescale designs for public spaces are welcomed. Their medium is adaptable to numerous applications such as lighting and wall coverings, room divider systems, and purely sculptural elements.

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generation .mgx

by Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe

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Generation .MGX

Having recently completed an industrial design program at Pratt Institute, I realize that I graduated on the cusp of a digital revolution. As an undergraduate in my late 30’s, I struggled through my CAD (ComputerAided Design) classes, a commiseration shared by a few other older students who - like me - never grew up playing “Dope Wars” or “Turtle” on the computer.

Back in school, the Rapid Prototyping (RP) lab was an obscure room sequestered away at the end of the hallway from which only the hardcore computer jocks emerged with funny little white models. Meanwhile, the rest of us “technically challenged” students labored away in the time-honored ways: carving plaster and blue foam or sketching with Bristol, foam core, wire and dowels. These days, all incoming sophomores are doing class projects using CAD and RP techniques and producing consistently mindblowing works. This new crop of students heralds a whole new generation in design, pushing fabrication technology to new heights and releasing the machine’s constraints from the machine aesthetic.

It’s no small coincidence that the majority of designers using this technology were born from the mid-1960s to the early ‘70s, as this is when Rapid Prototyping (RP) was first being developed. The designers of this generation came of age just about the same time as the technology did. Developed by Herbert Voelcker in the late 1960s, Rapid Prototyping is loosely defined as a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of an object using three-dimensional CAD data. Some of the RP techniques that are currently commercially available include Stereolithography (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS®), Laminated Object Manufacturing (LOM™), Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Solid Ground Curing (SGC), and Ink Jet printing techniques. The most prevalent of these techniques is Selective Laser Sintering (SLS).

Selective Laser Sintering was developed in the late 1980’s by University of Texas researcher Carl Deckard, who imagined “printing three-dimensional objects one layer at a time.” SLS is an additive technique that uses a high power laser to fuse small particles into a mass representing a desired three-dimensional object. The laser selectively fuses powdered material by scanning

cross-sections generated from a digital description of the part (for example from a CAD file or scan data) on the surface of a powder bed. After each crosssection is scanned, the powder bed is lowered by one layer thickness, a new layer of material is applied on top, and the process is repeated until the part is completed.

Compared to other rapid manufacturing methods, SLS can produce parts from a relatively wide range of commercially available powder materials including polymers (nylon and polystyrene, enhanced with glass or other fillers), metals (steel, titanium, alloy mixtures, and composites) and green sand. Because this is an additive process, the results are an exact copy of the computer models and produced with virtually no material waste. Sintering is a practical method for manufacturing one-of-a-kind objects, such as dental prostheses, which have to be tailored to each patient. What’s more, the machine can produce several dissimilar objects simultaneously—as many as the designer can fit onto the build platform.

In the design world, established veterans like Patrick Jouin and Freedom of Creation (FOC) Studio are taking advantage of material advances to push the boundaries of RP technologies into the realm of Rapid Manufacturing (RM). Architects and animators are also harnessing the power of these new processes, while conceptual designers like Hector Serrano and Commonwealth Studio explore the environmental and cultural implications of this new “machine language.”

Finnish designer Janne Kyttanen, principle of the studio Freedom of Creation, took advantage of CAD/ RP technologies to imagine and produce sensuous forms that were previously impossible to build by any mold. With his recent lamps, Dahlia and 1597, Kyttanen was inspired by the connections between mathematics and the laws of nature. Dahlia throws strong light effects on its immediate surroundings and is a dramatic lighting solution when used in a repeated sequence covering large wall surfaces. Selective Laser Sintering was the only technology that could create this stunningly beautiful light with its perfect spirals of softly illuminated petals.

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The design of the 1597 lightning fixture is based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers appearing in nature all around us. 1597 is inspired by the Coneflower and the way in which its seeds are arranged. The holes, depicting the small petals in the center of the flower, are placed around the bulb in such a way that no matter from what angle you look at the lamp, you can’t escape the rays of light that it creates.

Prototyping process. Though these techniques are called rapid, their progress and acceptance by industry has been slow and RP technology is still in an embryonic state. The first 3-D “print” was made about 15 years ago and used only for sculpting models from foam. Only recently have material advances in metals, sand and more solid resins made Rapid Manufacturing possible for the production of sturdy objects on a large scale.

It’s the complex geometry in projects like these that is one of the main selling points for additive manufacturing. It can produce objects of more complex shapes than any machining process can. An assembly of multiple pieces, including moving parts, can be built as a single element, without tooling.

Patrick Jouin’s folding stool, One_Shot.mgx (2006), uses the SLS technique, enabling the creation of the entire seating surface, legs and hidden integral articulations in just “one shot.” The stool emerges from the machine in its final and complete form, with all axles, screws, springs and hinges pre-assembled and concealed in the structure of the stool itself.

Jouin’s earlier piece, the C2 Solid Chair (2004) made use of these newer and stronger materials that helped Rapid Prototyping to progress into Rapid Manufacturing.

The concept for this chair was based on blades of grass blown up to a large scale and arranged in a way that allow structure to the piece to be contained by the form itself. Other pieces of SLS-produced furniture inspired by biomimetic forms are FOC’s Trabecula Bench and Monarch Stools. The Trabecula bench was inspired by the inner, low-density part of a bird bone. Trabecula is Latin for “small beam,” and while this form is very light-weight, it’s

“.MGX” is the file extension name for Magics Software which guides designers through the Rapid

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Generation .MGX three-dimensional structure makes it extremely strong.

Monarch Stools are a study for organic, but decorative lattice structures for furniture. All five stools are different in size, but stack over each other and are laser sintered in one production run. To date, C2, and Trabecula are some of the first products of this scale to be produced with RM technologies. Both are beautiful examples of how computer aided design has matured and taken on a life of its own. Though even with these advances in both materials and technology, Jouin’s C2 chair still took seven days to “print.”

The applications of SLS technologies began as a way to build prototype parts early in the design cycle, but they are increasingly being used for a much wider range of applications far beyond the design world. In addition to limited run manufacturing, architects and artists are all using the technology to produce complex shapes.

As Paola Antonelli, Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art notes, “Architecture is increasingly looking to design for its production practices as more and more buildings are being designed as large-scale objects.” To accommodate this trend, FOC created a spin-off company called Complex3D, which employs SLS production to assist architects in translating their designs from 3-D files into robust, scale models.

The benefits of this new method of model making are unprecedented when compared to existing manual laborintense methods. Speed, detail, scalability, complex shapes, and slicing are some of these new benefits.

While most users of Rapid Prototyping technologies employ these processes as “tools,” there are a few studios that approach it as a new medium which facilitates a different kind of thinking that was impossible to conceive before these processes came about. Commonwealth, a husband and wife architecture team comprised of Zoë Coombs and Francisco Boira, draw intensely from the field of art to execute a vision that is enabled by contemporary tools and embraces a complexity that is difficult to achieve via analogue means. Attempting to relate code-driven art to complex topology as well as digital technique to material form, Commonwealth are particularly interested in the intersection of artistic problems as they relate to the more collaborative nature of design.

Teaming up with digital graphic designer Joshua Davis, Commonwealth’s bodily forms, generated within animation software, were used as the underlying anatomy for a series of porcelain objects called Tropism Vases. RP-manufactured plastics served as

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the medium of translation, allowing Commonwealth to output the digital model into a material work. The RP models were then given to Boehm Porcelain, a traditional fine-bone porcelain maker, and cast into a series of porcelain vases. The overlaying graphic designs, created by freezing rule-based animated programs written by Joshua Davis, were output as sheets of ceramic paint, allowing Davis’s algorithmic compositions of colors and forms to be absorbed by the near-figurative surfaces of Commonwealth’s porcelain vases. The result is a series of unique works reflecting creative exchanges and mergers facilitated by digital design techniques and tools.

In short, complexity, intricacy and elegance are the central issues they attempt to evoke from this machine logic. The terms of design are different now, and Commonwealth is trying to communicate that at a very emotional level. Their use of digital design to make material results reinforces the understanding of

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Rapid Prototyping not merely as a “new tool,” but more deeply as a material artistic medium - especially when it is translated out of a direct SLA plastic and into a traditional material like fine porcelain.

At the other end of the conceptual spectrum, designer Héctor Serrano created a collection of souvenirs called Reduced Carbon Footprint Souvenirs for the Ten Again exhibition of sustainable design at 100% Design in London last September. The souvenirs can be sent by e-mail and then “materialized” using a personal 3-D printer. No transport or standard production methods are required, so the object’s carbon footprint is reduced to the minimum. While the material is not quite sustainable yet, the project questions the way objects are manufactured and new technologies are applied to propose alternative ways of reducing the impact on the environment. This becomes especially relevant as 3-D printers get smaller and more affordable. In the near future, this technology could be as accessible

Generation .MGX as standard ink-jet printing, enabling individuals to produce items in their own homes.

Issues of sustainability and transport aside, RM also speaks to the developing trend of Mass Customization, which allows increasingly active, creative consumers to personalize the products they consume. This has already taken hold in the two-dimensional world with the phenomenon of user-generated content like Blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube, as well as in the fields of desktop publishing, music and video. The time is ripe for the technology to make its mark on the threedimensional world.

As Ms. Antonelli points out, “Rapid Manufacturing Technology gives us amazing possibilities for ‘open source design.’ In the future, designers will be able to give their clients a complete framework for creating their own products, serving as consultants regarding form and structure. This has happened in every

medium from DTP to digital video, music and fashion.

Really, three-dimensional products are the last area that this digital revolution can put into the hands of the public.”

It’s not such a huge leap to imagine where things are going from here: advances in Rapid Manufacturing could eliminate factories, delivery trucks, and warehouses. Like the television or refrigerator, the modular stereolithographic printer could become a common household appliance. Just like ordering movies on demand, people could create and produce objects on demand; items ranging from high-end decorative arts and customized sneakers to all of the household goods that we consume every day (i.e. trash bins, plastic cups, food storage containers, light bulbs and faucet knobs). Perhaps some sustainable materials could be developed which can be thrown back into the machine for recycling. Hey, I think we might be on to something here . . .

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Fabric Images

Have any of these situations ever presented themselves to you? You are exhibiting at a tradeshow as one of hundreds (or thousands) of other vendors, and you want to make your company stand out. Or, perhaps, you have a retail store that you are trying to transform to promote a new line for a season. Maybe you run a hotel or an entertainment venue, and a client would like to create a custom environment for their special event. There are many options available, but most of them have been used—ad nauseum—and no longer carry the impact that you are looking for: banners, pop-up booths, posters, drapes—pick up a catalogue and review what everyone else is looking at.

In order to do something new and different, you have to look to a company that is doing new and different things. How does the idea of printing your message on fabric ten feet high and as wide as you want sound? Maybe you’ll take that textile and create a dramatic arching entryway to your space, using lights to play across the sinuous, curving surface. How about creating a series of freestanding structures, each covered in a different material, that would serve as both a visual and tactile environment for your guests to explore? All of this—and much more—is possible.

A dvertorial

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Fabric Images, a family-owned and minority-operated business has been exploring the combination of materials, printing, and tension architecture for more than a decade. Their operations encompass material research, dye-sublimation printing processes, and a full-service metal fabrication operation, and they have worked on projects large and small around the world. They are specialists in creating unique, dramatic installations that are easy to install, freestanding, and reusable.

One of the elements of Fabric Images that sets them apart is their spirit of exploration: constantly looking for new textiles with interesting surface qualities keeps them on their toes. Working with textiles gives them the opportunity to create lightweight structures with heavyweight impact: a printed textile, at just a few millimeters thick, can project the impression of everything from buildings to flowing water. Add to that the ability to be tactile—fuzzy or rubbery— translucent or shimmering, and you have the makings of a unique installation.

While they have been repeatedly chosen by exhibit and design firms to create exciting environments for clients like Delta Airlines, NBC, Miller Brewing Co., and Moen to create stunning environments at fairs, Fabric Images also creates unique elements and installations for retail environments, museum exhibitions, and hospitality partners. The flexibility of the textiles extends itself into the abilities of their products: any shape, any color, any message—if you can imagine it, they can create it.

The company currently works with some 150 different textiles, ranging from furs to meshes to stretch fabrics, and is always on the lookout for more. With this palate, they are able to create intricate, layered and bold creations that both convey strong visual messaging, as well as appealing to a more tactile side.

Their pieces invite interaction through the mix of textures and motion, graphics and shapes.

Poly-dimensional textiles, one of the latest material developments used by the company, offer the fusion of low-tech sensory exploration without the need for high-tech costs. This line of textiles offers a variety of opportunities that include customized printing

and messaging, layering for dimensional effect, and great versatility in lighting. These interactive textiles are fast becoming the next evolution in fabric-based offerings to hit the design/build community, offering an interactive playfulness and unexpected ambience to any design solution.

To celebrate the launch of their New York location, Fabric Images, Inc. will present a unique architectural installation called Instincts, a new line of polydimensional sensory textiles, at Material ConneXion during the 2008 International Contemporary Furniture Fair. This line of textiles creates the ability to extend the user-experience by involving the human senses of sight and touch and offers a variety of opportunities that include dressing organic architecture and manufacturing unique atmospheres through fabric solutions.

The exhibition will engage the poly-dimensional textiles in a way that allows for visitors to fully explore the unique properties of the material.

Instincts will be on view at Material ConneXion at 127 West 25th Street, 2nd floor, from May 14June 15, 2008.

Exhibition Hours: Monday – Friday, 9 am – 6 pm Special ICFF Weekend Hours: Saturday, May 17th & Sunday, May 18th: 10 am – 5 pm

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Competitive Conservation The Solar Decathlon, first envisioned in the year 2000, has been run in 2002, 2005, 2007, and will again be held on the National Mall in Washington, DC next year.

In 2009, twenty student teams chosen from around the world will build full-size model houses that will demonstrate their concepts for the future. They will be asked to consider virtually every aspect of homebuilding in their efforts, and will be graded in ten categories.

This event was conceived of as a way to teach both students and the public about the possibilities of solar power, and to reinforce the message of conservation.

Created when the price of a barrel of oil had skyrocketed to US$30 and natural gas cost around US$3 per 1,000 cubic feet – those costs are now $116 and $15 respectively – the message of responsibility and conservation is as important now as it was in 2000.

The stated objective of the Solar Decathlon is to demonstrate how clean and renewable solar energy can improve our quality of life. The program, however, is far more direct than any public service announcement: it challenges students – the very people who will be charged with safeguarding the environment in the coming years – to research, consider, and actually put into use the very materials, technologies, and concepts that become the houses and practices of the future. While all of the projects are reviewed on the following criteria – Architecture,

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Market Viability, Communications, Comfort Zone, Appliances, Hot Water, Lighting, Energy Balance, and Getting Around – each school (hopefully) will bring a different approach to the table.

While there is no specific judging category for furniture, many schools have involved their Interior Design programs and other programs to create unique pieces for their homes. With varying budgets and resources, the results of this collaboration cover a wide range of sustainable, technological, functional and aesthetic issues. For the furniture in the University of Cincinnati house, the students had limited time and no money.

Their answer to this challenge: hand-make furniture using hand-me-down pieces from the thrift store and covers knit from scrap materials. The approach upcycled waste materials into unique pieces that were tactile and visual additions to the interior. The Art Institute of Pittsburgh worked with the Carnegie Mellon University team to design everything from tables with integrated solar cells that could charge small electronics, to sustainably made ceramicware to stock the dining room. Students at Penn State created a modular, reconfigurable system that could be assembled into a bed, a couch, or multiple chairs from a single set of building blocks.

In both their 2005 and 2007 efforts, the teams representing New York Institute of Technology (NYIT,

Competitive Conservation

Furniture in the Solar Decathlon under guidance of Prof. Robert Allen, Martha Siegel, Margaret Newman and John Katamaris) proposed that the interior of the home, and its furnishings, be of vital consideration in the overall energy equation of the home. In both submissions, the floor plans of the homes were left entirely open with no partitions, relying on the pieces within the space to determine the activities and use within a particular area.

The creation of “micro-environments” was central to establishing a viable interior strategy. In 2005, active mechanical systems were developed within the furniture pieces to demonstrate the advantage of delivering comfort and utility at a local, individual level in lieu of larger conventional HVAC and electrical systems that condition the overall space for personal effect. For instance, a sofa was created that included an integrated heating, cooling and lighting system, driven by amorphous diffuse-light absorbing solar panels on the back of the piece. An entertainment station with its own air distribution, power and remote LED opticalfiber lighting system and an adjustable solar shade was also introduced to the home.

In 2007, the discourse on micro-environments was furthered to suggest that the open house be entirely serviced by three pieces of furniture. By creating flexible and multi-functional pieces, the team enabled the single space to meet the varied needs and demands

of a typical day. These pieces would serve the roles normally allocated to individual rooms and each piece would afford a multitude of uses depending on the function at-hand.

The sofa, for example, was sixteen feet long and served as sofa, recliner lounge, and storage unit with built-in messaging center featuring chalkboards and a magnetic note-posting area. The dining table could be a work station and dining arrangement for two, or be converted to accommodate dining for six, with integral server. Walls and ceilings reinforced the notion of a single space transforming to meet the demands of various functions. The ceiling was composed of uniform “scrim” panels, behind which was a lighting system of efficient LED and fluorescent fixtures, that can be switched as desired to create an infinite variety of effects to best suit the occasion. Walls were a combination of opaque and translucent sliding panels along the length of the house variably layered to create the desired effect.

With oil prices rapidly on the rise and the consequences of pollution and greenhouse gasses making themselves painfully apparent, the time is still ripe for conservation and more exploration of the ideas that these students are proposing. The future is theirs for the designing, and down the road we will all benefit from the innovative work that they are doing.

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Material Profile

Breakdown Biodegradable Plastics In our necessary evolution toward sustainability in production, everything we make will need to be reusable: either to be recycled back into useful manufacture, or as food for growing things through compostability. The emerging field of biopolymers – plastics made from renewable organic sources such as plants – has proved to be a positive move in this direction, allowing us the chance to produce packaging and disposable items from materials that will eventually make their way back to the earth.

New families of biopolymers are being developed that utilize raw materials such as corn, potatoes and sugar beets One family, under the name of PHA’s (Polyhydroxyalkanoates), are making headway into the consumer product arena, due to their similarity in properties to polypropylene. A number of companies produce PHAs, including Procter and Gamble, Biomer in Germany, and Metabolix in the US. The retailer Target released select gift cards made from this polymer and, more recently, DesignIdeas has released a range of injection molded bathroom accessories using this resin, sourced from the Chinese company, Tianan.

The resins are currently using corn as a raw material, but are produced by a different process from that of PLAs (Polylactic acids). These resins are created by “stressing” bacteria, which causes them to ferment sugars within plants and grow polymer granules directly within the plant. It is hoped that the process may be applied to plants other than current food sources in the near future.

Currently, the most prevalent version of PHA is a polyhydroxybutyrate valerate copolymer known as PHBV. It has properties similar to polypropylene: it is water insoluble and relatively resistant to hydrolytic degradation, has good oxygen permeability, is UV resistant, has a melting point of 175°C (347°F), and a glass transition temperature of 15°C (59°F).

PHBV has a tensile strength of 40 MPa, close to that of polypropylene, but sinks in water (while polypropylene floats), facilitating its anaerobic biodegradation in sediments. These resins may colored, though of course, any non-biodegradable

additives will remain after the PHBV plastic has been reduced to biomass. The resin can be used as an injection molding compound or extruded into yarn for weaving and knitting.

However, as has been the case with PLA, these PHA resins often require blending with other polymers to achieve desired properties. PLA has been blended to improve temperature resistance, impact resistance and usability as a textile (to address issues with dyeing and ironing). Enmat®, the resin used by DesignIdeas, is a blend of Tianan’s PHBV and BASF’s Ecoflex – a synthetic, biodegradable, food-contact-approved polyester made in Germany.

It is important to note that this blending, unlike some of the compounding between PLA and other resins, maintains the material’s biodegradability.

As with most new resin formulations entering the market, PHBV’s suffer from slightly increased pricing compared to other polymers with the same properties. Currently, the Enmat from Tianan costs between US$2.00-2.40 per pound, though with increased commercial-scale production, the prices are likely to drop to around $1.60 per pound. Despite that improvement, this is still some way from achieving the commodity cost of polypropylene which, despite current oil prices, is below $1.00 per pound.

Currently being used for consumer products and promotional items, it is proposed as a material for medical products, film products (such as mulch films, shopping bags, and compost bags), disposable items (pens, tableware) and packaging materials (especially for food packaging). Basically, these are the same applications that polypropylene currently is used for.

As is the nature of many biodegradable resins, the areas of most use tend to be where biodegradability is seen to be as a positive aspect rather than an impediment. Though, in theory, the products should last indefinitely under normal conditions, who says that they won’t prove to be a tasty treat for the ever ubiquitous bacteria that surround us?

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Material ConneXion® Bangkok A division of Thailand Creative & Design Center A division of IKMD, Office of the Prime Minister 6th Floor, The Emporium Shopping Complex 622 Sukhumvit 24 Bangkok 10110 Thailand Tel +66 (0) 2 664 8448 FAX +66 (0) 2 664 8459 Email infothailand@materialconnexion.com web http://www.materialconnexion.com/th Apisit Laistrooglai Managing Director Chompoonuj Weerakitti Library Director Yada Mahamongkol Business Development Manager Dararat Mekkriengkrai Materials Researcher Sujiga Chuenjai Account Executive Jintana Choopromwong Client Service Officer

Universal Design Packaging Temporary Exhibition at TCDC 26 Feb – 30 Mar, 08 Designing for people of all ages and abilities is what UNIVERSAL DESIGN is all about. Creating packages to accommodate a wide range of individual needs and abilities has now become manufacturers’ as well as the designers’ responsibility.

To provide the Thai public with an introduction to this concept, the Thai Packaging Association, the Thai Packaging Center and Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) and Material ConneXion Bangkok jointly organized the Universal Design Packaging Exposition which included, ehibitions, seminars and a Universal Packaging Design competition. A study tour to Tokyo Pack 2008 and research fund were awarded to the comnpetiton’s top winner.

All these events were planned to bring awareness of universal design, its application to packaging, and it’s benefits for consumers to Thai designers, packaging specialists and packaging manufacturers as well as the general public.

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Material ConneXion® Cologne A division of SURVEY Marketing + Consulting GmbH & Co. KG Lichtstrasse 43 G 50825 Köln Germany Tel

+49 (0) 221 99 22 28 0 FAX +49 (0) 221 99 22 28 11 infogermany@materialconnexion.com http://www.materialconnexion.com/de

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Peter H. Meyer President Martin Beeh General Manager Karsten Bleymehl Director of Library & Materials Research Marc-Oliver Lieving Business Development Manager Anne Farken Material Researcher Margarete Meyer Account Executive Chantal Sander Office Manager Anke Wöhler Public Relations

Euroshop 2008: 23 - 27 February 2008 in Düsseldorf/Germany Featuring renowned international exhibitors, Material ConneXion® Cologne, presented ‘Materialzone’ a special showcase at Euroshop, the world’s leading trade fair for the retail industry.

Offering a global stage to showcase a wide range of material and technology innovations, Euroshop 2008— The Global Retail Trade Fair is a barometer displaying trends in international retail industry.

With 1,600 exhibitors from 50 different countries and 90,000 visitors, the special exhibition ‘Materialzone’ provided just the right setting for Material ConneXion® Cologne whose experts in innovative materials and technologies provided an abundance of inspiring material product highlights and creative applications for architects, interior designers, retail and exhibition designers, as well as retail trade, event and marketing experts.

Presented in special, illuminated material containers, Material ConneXion® Cologne exhibited intelligent project solutions for the Retail Industry grouped in categories of safety, function, emotion and sustainability.

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Material ConneXion® Milano, s.r.l. materials library

Via Davanzati, 33 20158, Milano Italy +39 02 39 32 55 85 FAX +39 02 39 32 12 39 infoitalia@materialconnexion.com Web http://www.materialconnexion.com/it Tel

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showroom: la triennale di milano

Viale Alemagna, 6 20121, Milano Italy Tel

+39 02 72 43 42 55 FAX +39 02 39 32 12 39 triennale@materialconnexion.com http://www.triennale.it

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Michele Perini President Emilio Genovesi CEO Manuela Cifarelli Managing Director Micol Costi Director of Library & Materials Research Claudia Reder Material Researcher Paolo Cancellato Account Executive Muriel Costi Events & Exhibitions Cristina Bacchi Accounting

Salone Internazionale del Mobile

Materials Matter 2008

Material ConneXion, presented the exhibit “Sustainable Materials for a Better World”, a comprehensive overview of the latest sustainable material trends, at this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, from April 16-22, 2008. The exhibition, designed by Domus Academy in Milan, was presented together by Material ConneXion and Material ConneXion Milan.

To help navigate different approaches to sustainability, Material ConneXion showcased some of the most groundbreaking, sustainable materials available today and provided a glance at what the future of sustainability holds.

Material information from the Salone and beyond, including an overview of the latest material trends and an introduction to more than sixty innovative materials, will be available in Materials Matter—Material ConneXion’s annual exhibition compendium.

Material ConneXion Milan is once again pleased to offer its annual book, Materials Matter, for your reference.

Filled with more than 60 innovative materials and news on the latest material trends, Materials Matter is a wonderful tool for any creative person. Featuring highquality photographs and easy to understand information, it will appeal to professionals and students alike.

The exhibition included materials that are biodegradable, recyclable, efficient, lightweight, durable, nontoxic, made from resources that are easily renewable, and materials resistant to depletion. New advances in material processing were highlighted, with examples of materials that have been redeveloped to eliminate toxic gasses and harmful chemicals.

“Sustainable Materials for a Better World” allowed design professionals to look, touch, and experience the latest ecologically sound materials that are having the greatest global impact.

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Material ConneXion®, Inc. 127 West 25th Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10001U.S.A Tel

+1 212 842 2050 FAX +1 212 842 1090 info@materialconnexion.com http://www.materialconnexion.com

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George M. Beylerian Founder & CEO Michele Caniato President Andrew Dent, Ph.D. Vice President, Library and Materials Research Maider Irastorza Director of Sales, advanced material solutions teamsm Henry King Office Manager Michael LaGreca Director of Library Access Programs, Publications & Cultural Activities Richard Lombard Director of Public Programs Carmen Alfred Client Access Coordinator and Receptionist Deena DeNaro-Bickerstaffe Manager of Public Programs Terence Harris Assistant Facilities Management Gail Jones Senior Account Executive Awa Kamara Account Executive for Library Access Programs Lauren Levinsohn Material Archivist Sarah Natkins Director of Communications and Marketing Beatrice Ramnarine Materials Specialist Jake Remington Library Assistant and Project Manager Hilda Thomas Accounting Cynthia Tyler, Ph.D. Senior Materials Specialist Anika Vorndamme Exec. Assistant to the President, Int’l Licensing Liason Adrienne Wheatley Exec. Assistant to Executive Vice President Alison Zingaro Marketing and Communications Coordinator

Michele Caniato Promoted to President of Material ConneXion In February, the company was pleased to announce the promotion of Michele Caniato to President. Caniato has served as Executive Vice President of the company since 2005, and will take the reigns from founder George M. Beylerian.

“Mr. Caniato’s appointment marks an important step forward for the future of Material ConneXion,” said Beylerian. “Having played a vital role in the company’s recent growth and global expansion, he has proven himself to be a visionary leader with the ability to steer Material ConneXion towards the exciting goals we look to achieve in the coming years.”

Having been with Material ConneXion since its inception in 1997, Caniato has been a driving force in making the company the world’s leading platform for material innovations and solutions. Under his guidance, Material ConneXion has established international licensees in Milan, Italy, Cologne, Germany and Bangkok, Thailand, all of which he also oversees. He is credited with collaborating with Beylerian to turn ideas into tangible realities that successfully service the design industry and its partners.

Haworth Innovation Lab Material ConneXion has created an interactive exhibition called the Innovation Lab for Haworth’s staff and clients so that they can get a taste of what the world of materials holds in store for them. In this space, we are inviting visitors to Discover, Experience, and Create.

Discover: The Innovation Wall is a collection of materials gathered from a variety of different industries, and from around the world, the assembled materials showcases the most recent developments in materials innovation, across four distinct fields: Sustainability, Illumination, Processes, and Functional Surfaces.

Experience: The Sensorial Wall allows visitors to truly understand materials by touching large-format samples.

Create: Also assembled in the exhibition area are a showcase of some recent products that represent interesting and effective material choices.

Luxe Pack New York May 21-22, 2008 Material ConneXion will create an innovative lounge area that will explore materials and technologies relevant to the issue of sustainability: from recycling to dematerialization and energy efficiency to renewable resources. The lounge will contain furniture and furnishings that contribute to a more sustainable environment as well as material samples and information that can be applied to any industry. Stop by and relax—and learn a little while you are at it.

Altman + Metropolitan Pavilion 135 West 18th Street, New York City

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For further information, membership or a presentation customized to meet your needs please call 212.842.2050 or email info@materialconnexion.com

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