Architect and designer Neri Oxman is assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Mediated Matter research group. Her group explores “how digital design and fabrication technologies mediate between matter and environment to radically transform the design and construction of objects, buildings, and systems”.
The Mediated Matter group is dedicated to the development and application of novel processes that enable and support the design of physical matter, and its adaptability to environmental conditions. Their research integrates computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication. They seek to establish new forms of design and novel processes of material practice at the intersection of computer science, material engineering, design and ecology, with broad applications across multiple scales.
Projects like 6-D Phase Space express the distribution and magnitude of the forces that have brought upon them. Properties such as stress, strain, heat flow, stored energy and deformation are translated into physical properties of the printed object. The resulting model is six dimensional and includes 2-D information (X, Y), out of plane deformation (Y), elastic stress (S), strain (S) and temperature flux (T). Beast is an organic-like entity created synthetically by the incorporation of physical parameters with digital form-generation protocols. A single continuous surface, acting both as structure and as skin, is locally modulated for both structural support and corporeal aid. Beast combines structural, environmental, and corporeal performance by adapting its thickness, pattern density, stiffness, flexibility, and translucency to load, curvature, and skin-pressured areas respectively. Finally, like 6-D Phase Space – it’s predecessor E,X,Y,Z,S,S,T expresses the physical features of natural tissues express the distribution and magnitude of the forces that have brought them about. These forces embody the complex relations between physical matter in its given environment and denote its multi-dimensional force field. For more exciting projects by Neri Oxman see link below + see her talk from PopTech 2009 and most recent video interview here.
/via adafruit
