L AV O R E T T I
MARTINA
TARANTO
| Artworks, craft, prototyping but mostly fun.
WHAT IS THIS ALL
ABOUT ?
In this book you will find all the little things I have been making for #FabLabLondon during these months of (quite wild) internship. The products are an excuse to challenge myself. I tried to push my limits forward, improve my method, learn how to use properly digital fabrication technology, apply the principles of socio-semiotics and test them successfully. In these pages you will find exercises, experiments, suggestion ... it’s up to you though, if you will be able discover something interesting.
WHO DO YOU THINK AM I?
Recently graduate at IAAD Istituto d’Arte Applicata e Design in Turin, I am a devoted product designer. Compulsively passionate about Geometry, Art, Socio-semiotics, Politics, I believe these are significant instrument to build ever-changing and universal communication tools. Today communities are composed by the most diverse individuals, different cultures mixed together, different way of interaction, different grammars not just linguistic but also visual and graphic. The need of universally understandable signs, icons, symbols, languages, and the making of a universal alphabet is urgent. The potential of intuitive unspoken languages must be cultivated simultaneously, alongside with technology. Only in this way - I strongly believe - technological progress (and more) will be equally understood by everyone and the long aimed democratisation of design (and more) will be realistic. The revolution need to be something beautiful!
lasercut Since I started using the laser cutter at FabLab London I was fascinated about the extreme precision of its performance. Once you manage to master the software, the machine allows you to create a range of high quality items even if, in a matter of fact, they are made using rapid prototyping techniques and not industrial ones. In my “silly works� I tried to push the machine’s performance to its limits, cutting very thin and extremely complex shapes. These tests were always linked with the necessity to obtain the best result from the most performing material.
STE LLI NE
CHRISTMAS PRESENTS Since my family had never seen what a laser cutter can do, I decided to design a few artworks to give to them as Christmas presents. At that time I had used the laser cutter for a month, but always to make elemental designs. I wanted to test how far it was possible to push the machine’ s performance.
Q U A
N D O GUARDI
FUORI
CHRISTMAS PRESENTS I decided to translate some of my most complex and tangled drawings into vectorial files in order to exalt, through the laser cutter’ s performance, all the fine detail of my designs and the lightness of cut paper. I wanted my mum to hold my artwork in her hands as she does with the laces she loves so much. Basically I wanted her to realize that what I did with a machine can be as accurate and precious as something entirely handmade. It’s fascinating how shapes and colours can lead people to perceive an object in a precise way. At the end, as long as they tell a powerful story, the process of making is not so relevant in the economy of the item’s perception. My mother knows that I can make a thousand pieces identical to the one I gave to her, still she keeps my gift in an envelope because she doesn’t want to ruin it, she is waiting for my dad to put it in a frame.
C H R I S T
M A S S TO C K I N G S
CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS The 12th Dec 2015 me and the other interns at Fablab London organized and ran a Christmas Craft Workshop for Families. We wanted to show how everyone can use the lab’s facilities for their own projects, using the excuse of the decorations for the festivities. Along with ribbons, Santa sleighs and Christmas trees to be assembled, they had to sew together the two halves of laser cut Christmas stockings. I was in charge of their design. We wanted to use the laser cutter to produce the stockings so they needed to be made of an easy and safe material to be laser cut. Felt was the best choice, both from a technical and an aesthetic point of view; it is efficient and cost effective, plus thinking about socio-semiotic impact, felt would have been the most communicative material, being traditionally associated to the Christmas collective imagination.
ARMA
LE TA LE
D I S P L AY
UNIT
The drill is the first item we recovered from FabLab’s basement. It looks pretty scary - with its heavy metal body it seems like a futuristic weapon. In order to underline its design, structural parts and materials, I decided to create a support that would have been almost invisible allowing the drill to be the absolute protagonist. The structural support is made of 4 laser cut pieces of transparent acrylic, assembled together using slots that make it look suspended in middle air.
THE CANN ON BALL
ART WORK Honestly, what else can you do with a cannon ball from the 19th century other than turning it into a globe for magnetic laser cut baby ships!?
UN BOT TONE
D I S P L AY
UNIT
What you see in the pictures is an old battery switch from the 1920’ s. At that time it used to be installed on the wall, but now that we are showing it at the lab I thought that it would be cool to expose the piece in all its technical beauty from all its sides, so I used some mirrored acrylic as the base of the installation and I glued a laser cut and engraved label on the mirrored back. ... Plus if you are born in this century and you don’t see the wires in the back, there is no way you are going to understand what on earth is this weird guy!
3D printing 3D printing is an amazing technology, there are many kinds of 3D printers, some are very accurate (and expensive) others affordable but with a different level of performance. In terms of features, common 3D printers are not as accurate as common laser cutters, for example. The print’s quality is always linked to the complexity of your design. I used different kind of materials, from the rigid PLA, to the translucent filament, and all kind of the flexible ones I could find in the lab.
MA CI NA
MATITE
REDESIGN This grinder is one of the weird things found in the basement of FabLab London. I was asked to exhibit a few of them in the lab. This meat mixer is composed of many parts, but most of them are hidden. My intention was to reinstate this obsolete product in the lab’s everyday life - also I wanted its restyling to recall the object’s old function, like an echoing presence of the past. Because the hidden elements were not essential to understand the object’s ultimate function, I decided to remove them. I came with this idea of the pencil case because I was thinking of some object present in the lab that would have been easy to combine with my intention of recalling the grinder’s old function in an ironic way. I took a look around the lab and I saw all the colourful pencils stored in the sad box on the shelf. What I did is very simple: I replaced the metal grid where the meat used to come out with a 3D printed one designed to hold the pencils.
AM ON
PROTOTYPING Amon is a project I did while I was at university. We had to redesign a charger. The charger is one of the devices we use the most during the day. The brief was: after a discriminating analysis, rethink the object and design it again trying to solve all the technical issues such as wire’s breaking point, wire’s entanglement, risky projection of the plug’s teeth, size. Inspired by Ammonites and natural spirals, I designed an extreamely compact object, optimized in all its components, functional, ergonomic and intuitive. During my internship at Fablab London, I prototyped it with 3D printers using rigid and flexible PLA filaments.
3D MO DE LING
IN.
CER CHIO
PRO TO TY PING
IN.contro is another university project. We had to rethink a SMART light bulb. Light is necessary to build social relationships - with no light our communication skill suffer of a considerable lack of efficiency. While I was elaborating my ideas on this assignment, I reasoned about all that kind of situations in which the lack of light produces a handicap, and most importantly I tried to figure out who really suffers of that handicap. If you are redesigning an “already smart” light bulb, the first thing you might think is try to improve and boost efficiency and digital features, maybe obtaining a “super-smart” light bulb but at the end not something essentially new. Who is that need something “smart” than? Who are those people that in the 21st century need light to improve their life? Imagine you are 18 - hanging out with your friends - until late - in the night. Imagine you are exited/angry/bored/interested to a conversation/scared of something... imagine you are also deaf - it might be quite predictable you’ll need light to communicate how you feel to who surrounds you. Deaf people communicate using hand gestures and facial expressions, they need light to be seen talking and to read other people’ s mouth. They emphasize hands and face expressions in order to better convey emotions and conditions. Native Americans’ communication system was based on universal signs language to allow members of different tribes, speaking different tongues to relate easily; we might stereotype them around a bonfire, but is more a matter of communication efficiency than romanticism. I designed a light bulb, independent from plugs, powered by battery, to be carried with you, or to be found in pubs and public spaces every time you need it - something that you can find wherever you are as easily as you find toilet paper! It has a soft, flexible and foldable bulb to be kept away easily. It is not a torch to blind friends with that deaf people need. The bulb, in fact, is necessary to diffuse light and to create a propitious atmosphere for the conversation. A voice sensor locates the direction where the voice of the speaker came from, the light will increase in power in that direction, in order to make the speaker more visible. A touch sensor convey the holder’ s emotions translating its strength into meaningful light signs such as trembling, pulses, flashes. Communication is defined not only by words but also by the speakers’ mood! During my internship at Fablab London, I 3D printed the light bulb using rigid, flexible and translucent PLA filaments.
3D MO DE LING
3D MO DE LING
option2 foldable reversible bulb
MARTINA
TARANTO
| Product Designer
+44 07 93 99 83 316 martina.taranto@gmail.com 23 Fir Grove, New Malden, Greater London, Surrey, KT3 6 RH
Upgraded CV on LinkedIn.
:) #lavoretti #2016 #martinataranto