Find the PDF with the process of the Waffle Chair attached in the link below.

WaffleChair_Owen-Sridharan

The final design conceptual images.

The laser cutting process.

Goals

Understanding 3D printing – The main goal we set for ourselves was to create a Lego brick from which we could learn the most regarding, for our minds, a relatively new concept: 3D printing. This was done by abandoning our initial thoughts on fabrication by exploring new forms and Ideas. We also wanted to make sure that we could make something with the 3d printer we couldn’t in any other way.

Learning Rhino – As it was a first time for both of us working with Rhino software, we were eager to absorb as much as possible from the computation lesson and to treat the Lego brick as an exercise to maximize our 3D modeling skills. Therefore we were looking to create a model that would be complex enough to be able to get the most out of it.

Minimizing material / Maximising efficiency – The last goal was to minimize the material used, not to avoid the costs of this expensive material, but rather to push our design idea to the limits as to understand the possibilities of additive 3d design and to test these materials properties.

Concept

At first, like most teams, we looked at several famous buildings for inspiration (of which the skin is a structural element or entire structure) such as the Prada Epicenter in Tokyo, Centre Pompidou – Metz and several others. However, at one point we found an interesting article on a young Dutch designer, Joris Laarman, who worked on a range of furniture in collaboration with Opel (the car brand), which inspired us the most.

The concept behind this design is to recreate structures based on the way bones grow, giving great strength to lightweight, minimal material usage constructions.

We decided to adopt the idea and put it into practice as this was closely related to our initial ideas and were key elements of our goals.

Process

The polylines defined the limits of the brick, and then the ‘control points’ was used to modify those lines toward the inside, picking it from the center of each line.  Circumferences were made using the ‘circle’ tool and were placed at each end of the lines, and also an extra small circle was located in the center of each line.

After that, ‘loft’ command was necessary to join a continuous surface from all of the circles following each line that worked as rails.

With ‘spiral’ command, the spring-like elements were placed at each side of the brick, to connect other bricks on top and bottom of it.  The same technique [loft] was used to create the surfaces of the spiral elements.

Then, ‘boolean2objects’, ‘booleanunion’, and ‘booleanintersection’ were used to clean up the inside intersections.  Sometimes, it was used the ‘trim’ or the ‘split’ command to accelerate the process.

Finally, the ‘mesh’ command was use to convert the entire volume in one single mesh.

The Production:

Towards the end, there were some technical difficulties, and the brick couldn’t be 3D printed.  The initial problems were the fact that there were several meshes, interceptions, and naked edges, after trying to fix it for more than 3 days a new brand brick was born from all these problems.

The new brick try to follows the initial design, although slightly different.  Its components are much bigger and precise than the original one.