Contour Crafting: The Art of Printing Houses

Just over a year ago, I wrote an article about the flying robots being developed at UPenn, and their ability to assemble 3-dimensional structures out of constituent parts without direct human control. I described what I saw as the future application of this sort of technology – the near-autonomous robotic assembly of prefab houses.

But more recently, a group of USC professors has been working to robotically construct customizable houses in a different way: they want to print them. The idea is to use a 3-d printer, much like the kind used today in rapid prototyping, but instead of extruding plastic it would extrude quick-setting concrete. What’s amazing about this method of building is that the robotic printer doesn’t care what kind of structure it’s building. In other words, this is pre-fab architecture in the sense of using only a few basic components (top plates for doors and windows, ceiling material, and liquid concrete), but it allows for an infinite variety of designs. This video does a fantastic job describing and visualizing this process:

Contour crafting is a way of building homes rapidly and (one would hope) cheaply, but it does have a number of downsides. For starters, although there are infinite variations of potential designs, there are limits to what it can achieve, at least at this stage in the design process. The primary limitation is that so far this is a method that only uses concrete, so it won’t be able to replace conventional construction methods in buildings that require other materials – like wood and metal – for structural or aesthetic purposes. Also, while I wouldn’t describe this as shoddy construction, it certainly isn’t able to approach craftsman-like levels of quality. So the types of structures are limited to relatively simple designs involving rectilinear spaces without much attention to detail.

The other big drawback to contour crafting is the environmental impact involved in the use of concrete, and more specifically, the cement used in the making of concrete. Both concrete and cement are mineral mixtures, so must be mined. While these minerals aren’t exactly scarce, mining itself has severe negative impacts on the environment, and the use of concrete as the base material for the mass printing of homes would vastly increase the demand for minerals. Furthermore, the manufacture of concrete is one of the largest sources of atmospheric CO2, a major greenhouse gas, producing over 5% of all anthropogenic emissions. So while contour crafting might be an enticing socio-economic solution to the housing problem, it isn’t feasible from an environmental standpoint, at least with current industry practices.

That said, one of the most interesting potential applications of contour crafting isn’t here on earth at all, it’s on the moon. The group at USC behind these innovations envisions sending unmanned missions to the moon to start building a settlement before humans arrive for colonization. Apparently lunar rock contains enough of the constituent materials for cement to make the project feasible, if not yet practical. So far as the eventual colonization of the moon is concerned though, this is an important development. Keeping human astronauts alive is one of the most challenging aspects of any kind of space voyage, so if we want to establish a lunar base, it isn’t practical to send a human construction crew. Instead, we’ll need to do just what contour crafting seeks to do – send robots ahead of us to establish ready-made, safe environment for the first human settlers. That’s where the real future of contour crafting seems to lie, not in the mass production of cheap buildings on earth.

Sources: FastCo.Design, USC.

The WikiSpeed Car

There’s a lot of impressive stuff going on in the automotive world right now. The once-revolutionary Prius is taking a back seat to the new generation of electric head-turners, like the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf, and the emperor of them all, Tesla. Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but you get the idea. There’s a race going on for most fuel-efficient, and it’s carried the cutting edge of the industry back into the electric car market. This is a great thing, and even though we’ve got a lot further to go, we ought to be happy with the gains that we’re starting to see on the road.

But even these cars that seem so revolutionary…aren’t. What we’re seeing today is the second coming of the electric car (see Mass Transit and the Restructuring of Cities for more info), and while this is undoubtedly a move in the right direction environmentally, it doesn’t bring with it a critical reexamination of the car as a whole. Even these most exciting new cars are just cars, but electric.

To build a car that can really change the game, you have to think outside the box. That’s what Joe Justice is doing with his SGT01 car and his network of volunteer mechanics called WikiSpeed. Let me start by saying the SGT01 isn’t electric. It isn’t even a hybrid. But it is one of the most fuel-efficient, intelligently designed cars ever made. It gets 104mpg city and 114mpg highway, which with a 4-gallon tank gives it a range of 400 miles. Couple that with 0-60mph in 5.5 seconds and 5 star crash safety and you’ve got a pretty good car. Oh, and it only costs $25,000.

Okay, I know that last part sounds impossible, and it probably is, but not as impossible as you might think. See, what Joe Justice is doing differently than most is building light and building modular. An extruded aluminum chassis and a carbon fiber body make the car only 1,042lbs, about half the weight of the Prius. Less weight means more fuel efficiency and more speed. But the really cool part about this car is the second way Justice is changing the game: modularity.

One of the core concepts behind WikiSpeed cars is the ability to swap components. This doesn’t mean you get to choose between real or faux paneling, or how many cup holders. If you owned a WikiSpeed car, for about $1000 you could take it into the shop and get the body swapped for a newer model. Or if a more efficient (or powerful) engine came out, just bring your car in and let them upgrade it. The idea is that the car isn’t a single entity, it’s a modular assembly of parts that can be traded in or upgraded at will.

I can’t say this enough: this is a brilliant idea. Think about choosing a car to buy right now; it isn’t an easy decision to make. Even the most fuel efficient cars on the road are going to be hopelessly outstripped in 6 or 7 years, and a good car ought to last you more than that. What if you go gasoline, and the electric infrastructure blows up in a few years while oil prices skyrocket? What if you go electric, and it never really pans out, and breakthroughs in hydrogen technology make it the dominant automotive tech? With a modular car, you don’t have to worry about it, you can just take it in and have them swap the engine for a better one. And as your car begins to look dated, you can upgrade it’s appearance. Or the audio input, or the GPS system, or anything else  you don’t like!

As far as WikiSpeed cars actually go, well, they’ve still got a long way. The car is only a prototype right now, and WikiSpeed is desperate for more capital investment. The modular system they have in place is highly efficient, but still pretty ugly. And most of the work being done right now is volunteer work, so the car is far from being profitable. But I think its value lies in its vision. There are good ideas here that deserve to be considered by major companies and demanded by consumers.

If you’re interested in WikiSpeed, check out the article in Seattle Met, then head over to their website.

“Objects” by Seung-Yong Song

It’s rare to find product design that radically challenges the existing paradigm for an item of commonplace furniture. Take, for example, the chair. It is one of the simplest objects around, and one with the most obvious function. But that function alone wasn’t enough for South Korean designer Seung-Yong Song, who undertook a series of projects that shaped a prototypical chair to accomodate a variety of additional uses.

First up is his project fittingly titled, “8-Objects.” It consists of 8 chairs that have been outfitted with elements of other bedroom furniture. There’s a desk, clothing rack, shelves, and even a bedroll. These “chairs” can be spread around the room, or combined to form a bed platform. I put chairs in quotes there because it seems misleading to designate these innovative multifunctional objects with so mundane a term. And yet when it comes down to it, they are first and foremost chairs, I think that’s the most interesting part. To me, these are clearly not new items of furniture, they are chairs who have experienced a growth of function and character.

Then there is Object-A, a beautifully organic, spatially efficient, and downright weird hybrid between a chair and a set of shelves. Of the project, Seung-Yong says, “I am looking in every nook and cranny of the room to find hidden spaces. Under the table, beneath the bed, above the wardrobe … All the space in the room is completely full of odds and ends. There’s no other choice. And I start building my objet like the city’s tallest building seen from the window in the room.”

Object-B is similar to A in that it also offers the functionality of a shelving unit, but it also functions as a ladder. The reason I’m including it here though, it primarily because of the striking form achieved by putting two of them back to back. This attention to combination and orientation is one of the things that makes this such a wonderful series of objects.

Finally, I’ve got to mention Object-E, a rocking chair with a drying rack above it, so that the clothes dry in the breeze as you rock. This is a brilliant synthesis of purpose that, although perhaps awkward to carry out, makes for a great idea. What impresses me most about all of these projects is the open mind that went into their design. Seung-Yong speaks to this same point. “The unique name of things limit the range of product’s shape and function, but above all, the fact that there exists stereotyped function in accordance with each unique name suppresses my imagination. I am not willing to deny or destroy the identity based on the stereotype, but I only reinterpret the uses I need in my own design language.”

This willingness to look first to function and necessity, and only then to the archetypes that traditionally serve, is the mark of a truly great designer. In cognitive psychology there is a concept known as an “anchor,” the idea being that if we are given a suggestion before having to estimate a particular variable, we will almost certainly be influenced by that suggestion, no matter how irrelevant it seems. For instance, if I ask you if Ghandi was older or younger than 144 when he died, and then ask you to estimate his age of death, you will clearly see the implausibility of my suggested number, yet you will nonetheless tend to overestimate his age of death as a result. You will have been anchored to some degree by my suggestion.

Similarly, it takes extraordinary effort to avoid the anchor of conventional design interpretation. A car is just a vehicle for self transport, and a chair is just a device for sitting; nowhere within the project constraints is there anything about a combustion engine or a back of a certain height. But while all designers can appreciate the intellectual importance of these ideas, it takes great willpower and determination to ignore these cognitive anchors, and yet this is what designers must do – and what Seung-Yong has done here.

Sources: Dezeen, seungyongsong.com.