3D printing as ideation tool

Make-It-Yourself (MIY) 3D printing is the personal manufacturing process of turning a 3D digital design file into a solid object using open-source 3D printers or printers that come in a box ready to print. Involving both soft- and hard-ware skills, the set-up and operation, however, can be more difficult than it seems. For example, using polymer-based materials, a skip of the printer or glitz in the extruder may ruin the print, a failure that happens when the plastic filament melts and get wrapped around the print head. Or, when the gears on the printer's X and Y axis belts slip on the motor shaft causing the print head not to be properly aligned from layer to layer. Or, when the print head knocks off a part of model, or the object becomes loose from the print-bed. Or, when simply using wrong settings. But print failures, although frustrating, particularly when they occur several hours into the print process (and large-scale objects can take anywhere from 24-48 hours to complete), can be seen as learning since failures are often steps towards new discoveries. Indeed failures can be turned into serendipitous art work, or so called "glitch art". Learning from failure, or trial and error, as embedded in creative processes, then turn 3D printing into an ideation tool.

Idea-driven design

Ideas drive design. But ideation is much more than a sudden flash of inspiration from out of the blue, or the Eureka or Aha! moment. It is process work involving skills that can be learned, taught and practiced. It's an incremental process that navigates between ideas which are either too obvious or unclear unleashing the flow of creativity. This is what the workshop seeks to address; to experiment and build experiences with concept tools, from sketching to modelling to sticky notes, to encourage greater transparency of ideation processes.

Ideation as nomadic event

The ideation workshops aim at liberate the participants from the analogue-digital dialectic to engagement with conceptual tools that multiplies potentials. In this pursuit, ideation becomes an improvised event without a model, dynamic and cyclical rather than static or intermittent. Or, in a Deleuzian sense, ideation represents nomadic rather than sedentary thinking that produces difference within its very repetitions and where difference and repetition are both positive forces with unpredictable effects. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (transl.). NY: Columbia University Press.

Mechanical drawing in the digital age

Until the emergence of digital drawing tools, a clear distinction was made between the free-hand sketch and mechanical drawing, the former used by the artist from an aesthetic viewpoint, the latter by the engineer or artisan. The mechanical drawing's main advantage over the sketch is that it is made to scale with true measurements, and all dimensions are proportional and properly placed to avoid errors in construction, whereas the sketch is loose and open to interpretation. But although measured drawings are necessary for fabrication, computer-aided-design has blurred the lines between drawing and sketching, and draughtsmen use their knowledge and skills to translate sketch ideas into detailed technical drawings in a seamless flow.

Design drawing culture

When doing ideas projects, such as architectural competitions or conceptual designs, designers use sketching and sketch models in ways production drawings cannot.

3D printing as ideation tool

Although 3D printing, also know as rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, or solid free-form fabrication, was first patented in the 1970s, it is only with new advances in 3D solid computer modelling that it is enabling designers across disciplines, including product, fashion and accessory designers, to think creatively about their output in ways that were previously unimaginable. 3D printing, then, as integrated into design thinking, has become an alternative or complimentary ideation tool. However, as the 3D printing process requires access to a 3D CAD program, the designer need a good grasp of 3D CAD.

Grounded Ideas

Art and design schools like Central Saint Martins provide students with space and time to grow and mature creative ideas, while remaining grounded in a specific craft. Craft is a divisive element to this form of education because it somehow constrains, shapes and confines the students idea formation (ideation) in order for their thinking processes to expand.