The Lotus Flower it’s a kinetic and dynamic structure.

The goal of the exercise was to producing 3d printed pieces and explore the design opportunities arising from the potential and limitations of the technology to create a dynamic assembly with 2mm diameter rods linked together by 3d printed pieces.

Our idea was to design just one joint. This joint should had the capabilities of generate through the connections between themselves and with the help of the elastic nature of the tubes in order to form two geometrical moments, one that’s goes up and another one than goes to the sides.

The dynamic nature of the joint allows a level of movement between the rods themselves in a translation system by moving the rods in to a circle to move within itself and transfigure into a bigger or smaller structure.

Digital Fabrication – Exercise 3D Printing

Group 22: Gökhan Çatıkkaş, Juhi Patel, Sebastian Alvarado

The project consists of simple joints and their response to the stored energy inside the rods. Playful. The rods stay in form with the already stored energy and if you touch and release the energy it “explodes”.

The explosion does not make the installation irregular, but it makes it back to its ordinary geometric form. This explosion does not mean destruction and irregularity, it brings silence and order to the geometry.

In the design process we aimed to experiment with different types of assembly. Each rode finishes with a sphere which arrives to a central assembly point.

The “gathering” joint’s outline is shaped in a way to have all the spheres inserted and let them move in all directions. Additionally, underneath the board (standing on 2cm blocks) there are wheeled-joints allowing the rods to move on the surface. The rails cut in the board are keeping the pipes in the assigned tracks.

The structure changes from a tightly angled curves with a lot of tension and stiffness to more loose hyperbolical shapes, which rigidity is kept because of a refined twist at the base.