Koraillon Light the Way Entry

Last crawled date: 3 years, 2 months ago

Insipational Feeds:

The thematics concerning the generative design, in my opinion, are strictly bounded to the nature of natural laws. The suggestion given about art, energy and music translate in an organic mixture of meanings regarding the rules of the physics.

I noticed that it was inevitable not to start from the definition on energy as it presents in the known existing, it means in a chaotic way. Everything we see is ruled by the continous movement of energy in different state of entropy and that forges the shape of everything and with it the ideal of beauty which is since forever interpreted by art and music. Designing something with appealing aestethics means designing following the rule of the nature and in this case is absolutely crucial the use of a generative strategy. We can totally see how such kind of behaviors are seen often: water flowing, sparks in motion, ant's walking path, trees, the spread of Physarum and last but not least the coral.

The coral has an extremely interesting behavior, his shape can change due to an infinite kind and amount of parameters (water temperature, flow, composition, tenor and so on) but still at the end it finds a totally recognizable shape even if none coral is similar to the other. So how we can translate those properties to our design?

Generative Design Workflow:

For that purpose I used Grasshopper algorithms to emulate every kind of behavior (the algorithms used are provided):

The flocking behaviour is achieved throughout the Culebra plugin. A base shape and a population is given, than through the management of the alignment, crawling, separation and cohesion the lines are generated. These processes, even if not literally random, have so many variables that every design is unique therefore PURELY generative. The parametric properties give us the capability of growing the coral on every desired shape.

An important step is to simulate also the auto arranging behavior. Coral while growing tends to stick together to the closest seed and move away from the far one which instead get closer to another seed.

Eventually to simulate how the calcium deposits from the polyps (just like enamel deposits on teeth or calcium on stalactites) I run a marching cube algorithm through Cocoon plugin which returns isosurfaces and thereafter refined mesh. The mesh got eventually shortly manipulated to achieve the mechanical function.

Function and printability:

The design has an extremely high flexibility and ease of use. The lampshade is based on the most common size of E27 lamp holder and it can be used as a pendant lamp or a table lamp just by switching side and screwing the holder on it. The lamp provides an astonishing shading effect, as show in the raytraced renders, due to the bulb position. The shape flexibility is shown by the providing of 3 different lamp shade. The lamp number 2 has to be printed in 2 parts. The design tries to reduce to 0 the need of support by shaping the base form on angles that don't exceed 45°, that is not applicable to the lamp number 3 which needs supports. To reduce the risk of mistakes i provided both the supported and non supported version. The supports are obtained throughout a self made algorithim which is also provided. The voxel system should give a self supporting structure and the autoarrange process should drammatically decrease the amount of used material.