Build Organs

“Build Organ” is an experimental project relied on 3D printing as a Digital Fabrication techniques. Following the “Swarm Behavior” principles, a form generating tool was developed by using Processing as a user-friendly interface. Through this interface, the users/designers are able to have partial control to draw the initial powerline (a polygonal line here) as a guideline for form-generating. The script will add a vector to these control points as their Z-axis to transform the original powerlines into 3-Dimension. Afterward, an attractive force applied to these 3D powerlines will drive a swarm of agents float around it. With the assistant of mesh brush function from the tocixlib library in Processing, the agents are able to generate volumetric form among themselves under the principle in accordance with the approximate threshold in between any 2 agents.

While the form is generated, it can immediately be exported as a STL format file for 3D printing. By harnessing the Ultimaker 2 machine with its own open source software, CURA, a 3D model object can easily be imported and manipulated to a proper position for printing. Within the constraint of the printable size, the objects of “Build Organs” were designed in a jewelry scale. However, the design process and principle can retain the same but varies/extend in scale to develop objects from wearable accessories to architectural scale.