Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Instead, reactive blueprints would be applied to design projects where the
environment is unknown and even changing.
A reactive blueprint could guide a large concrete printer that's printing
out a house that needs to adapt to a yet unknown terrain, a bridge that needs
to adapt to wind conditions, or a lampshade that needs to compensate for
particular ambient lighting conditions. A reactive design blueprint would be
ideal in surgical chambers. Maybe someday in situ 3D printers will fabricate
biological tissue inside the human body that adapts to the unique conditions
of every individual body.
Design software executing a reactive blueprint would irst need to scan
the target environment. It would also need to be able to
simulate
the target
environment with great accuracy in order to know which rules will be trig-
gered and when. Using this information it will be able to “grow” the shape
suitable for that speciic environment. The shape would then be made by a
3D printer.
When a designer is preparing a 3D printer to print out reactive blueprints,
it will be impossible to know in advance exactly how the inal design will turn
out, and what it will look like. The feedback for each situation will be different,
changing the speciic details of the ultimate design. In nature, for example,
plants often grow toward a light source, but after a period of growth will stop
at a certain height due to internal stress induced by their own increasing
weight. If you were given the ability to design a plant's growth, you could set
up rules that permit the plant additional growth when it is exposed to external
light. You would temper that growth with rules based on stress sensors that
manage the plant's growth so it doesn't get too tall and cause internal loads
that are too high.
Working together, these two rules—external and internal—if applied to
plants in different conditions, would result in plants of different heights and
shapes. Even two plants with the same rule set, if one were kept in dim light
and the other in bright sunlight, would end up looking different because of
the different feedback their sensors provided and the different response that
feedback triggered from the rules.
One lampshade design, many custom lampshades
How could future designers apply reactive systems to the product design process?
Imagine a dynamical blueprint for a lampshade. The shape of the lampshade
would be speciied using a set of rules that would be applied to a simple “starter
shape” to develop the lampshade's inal design. You would place the lampshade
