Furthermore, for the past 3 years I have been working at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, operating a CNC machine and laser cutter for design, architecture, and art students, as well as seasoned designers under my capacity as a makerspace manager at Hansen
House. As a result, I can proudly say I know a thing or two about CAM, toolpaths, chiploads, Gcode, etc.
Overall, I like to approach the digital fabrication process from an exploratory place. This means not only learning standard practices, but also using what I know to utilize the technology within my reach in new and interesting ways. In front of you is a mix of fully conceived and exploratory designs done in the digital space.
First of all it is important for me to demonstrate how important it is to educate to digital craftsmanship. Here is a taste of a course I gave to Visual Communications students at Bezalel, how to use a laser cutting machine to its full potential. The first two images are a test plate I made to demonstrate to them the different capabilities of the machine.
While teaching myself parametric design I made a go at creating a geodesic bowl that could be manufactured with a laser cutter and sewn together with string. I was exploring the intersection of handmade and digital crafts.
Another exercise in parametric design. It was an experiment to see whether I could create a dovetail that is encoded with a literal message input by the user.
Here I made a tongue-in-cheek design I call ‘handmade dovetail’. Ironically, while the dovetail did succeed, it was not without a significant amount of handwork cleaning the two 3D prints so that they fit one another.
Another foray into the world of parametric design led me to program a code that allowed me to create a weave pattern within a digital 3D space. Within this code I was able to generate messages within the weave and also a measure of randomness to mimic the original handmade craft. I was even somewhat successful in milling a piece of pine with the digitally generated weave pattern.
Exploring different plug-ins for grasshopper, I found a way to sample a bitmap image and turn it into a heightmap. I used this to take a sketch of a prehistoric cave painting nicknamed ‘The Sorcerer’ and turn it into a 3D image milled carefully on a clay tablet. By way of 21st century technology I transmuted a prehistoric work of art into another prehistoric medium.
Using an intermediate level of text manipulation code in Grasshopper, I created a program to muddle Gcode for a 3D printer. It was an exercise in inserting randomness into the digital process of fabrication. By shifting the location of the coordinates a variable amount, in addition to jittering the order of the print coordinates per layer, I turned a simple bowl into something that resembles a birds nest. You can watch a simulation of the printing process over on Vimeo.
This large gallery represents just a sample of the digital labour that went into crafting my final thesis for my M.Des degree. The final project spanned multiple platforms, such as Midjourney, Adobe Illustrator, Rhino, Grasshopper, and more, not to mention the CAM softwares for the machines I used to produce the exhibit.
For one of my courses I tried to implement AI into the design process. This was done when Midjourney and Dall-E were relatively new, and 3D generation was still very much in its infancy. I created a model wherein the use inputs answers to 4 seemingly inocuous questions about their state of being. These answers help to generate 4 facial models that are put together in a totem configuration. The design is then output as an STL file for 3D printing. In the last image you can see 10 different inputs and their respective totemic figures.