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I’ve covered Kram/Weisshar’s Breeding Tables before, and they’re now available for sale at Moroso. I was finally able to see them up close - including process documentation and parts splayed out - at the Pompidou center a couple of weeks ago. To recap, the tables are generated using a genetic algorithm; its parts are cut from a single sheet of steel using computer-aided machining, welded and painted into unique instances of the table family. While the table can’t exactly be flat-packed, this already historic design piece points the way towards the use of generative algorithms to devise more compact and efficient designs while affording a new kind of one-off craft.
[Editor's Note] This video explains the work in a bit more detail.
. Leo is a artist, inventor and all around practical person in the Tangible Media Group at the Media Lab. He has a background in sculpture, architecture and industrial design as well as an MS from the Media Lab spent working on the kitchen of the future. He is on a search for truth.
That’s ugly. Why all the cutting and teeth on every part? If you want to make a table out of a single sheet of steel, then just cut half the sheet into strips and use the other half for the top. Weld the strips as legs and braces. What do you need the computer and complexity for? Art? With a little creative hinge placement, it WILL fold flat.
Art is in the eye of the smallholder. - Paraphrased Wendell Berry
While this isn’t to my personal aesthetic tastes, that’s not really the purpose of the table. The goal is to start with a design requirement (one sheet, make a table). I would argue that (while it is surely presented in part as art), the innovation has nothing to do with art. It is more about problem solving, and how genetic algorithms can be used to solve problems within certain constraints. Obviously a skilled human designer can make a more conventional looking table, but a computer sees things differently. If it’s only requirement is that the table supports a flat surface evenly, the kinds of tables it will produce will be fairly varied in their support structure.
What this is really about is a shift from ‘product’ design to process design. Instead of design ‘a table’, the designers want to use the GA to design a process for making tables. The implication here is that you could have computer crafters that (much like a human craftperson) you can hand a material to them and say, make me a table out of this.
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That’s ugly. Why all the cutting and teeth on every part? If you want to make a table out of a single sheet of steel, then just cut half the sheet into strips and use the other half for the top. Weld the strips as legs and braces. What do you need the computer and complexity for? Art? With a little creative hinge placement, it WILL fold flat.
Art is in the eye of the smallholder. - Paraphrased Wendell Berry
While this isn’t to my personal aesthetic tastes, that’s not really the purpose of the table. The goal is to start with a design requirement (one sheet, make a table). I would argue that (while it is surely presented in part as art), the innovation has nothing to do with art. It is more about problem solving, and how genetic algorithms can be used to solve problems within certain constraints. Obviously a skilled human designer can make a more conventional looking table, but a computer sees things differently. If it’s only requirement is that the table supports a flat surface evenly, the kinds of tables it will produce will be fairly varied in their support structure.
What this is really about is a shift from ‘product’ design to process design. Instead of design ‘a table’, the designers want to use the GA to design a process for making tables. The implication here is that you could have computer crafters that (much like a human craftperson) you can hand a material to them and say, make me a table out of this.
See newly embedded video as well.
Very nice blog on furniture….