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DesignNewswire · COMO, Italy ·

Bronze A' Design Award in 3D Printed Forms and Products Design Goes to DefeXtiles Textile Fabrication by Jack Forman

The international grand jury of the 2020 - 2021 A' Design Award & Competition recognizes Jack Forman for 3D printed forms and products design

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COMO, Italy, April 23, 2021 /DesignNewswire/ A' Design Award & Competition has announced that DefeXtiles Textile Fabrication by Jack Forman, designed for Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab, has been granted the Bronze A' Design Award in the 3D Printed Forms and Products Design category. The award was conferred within the 2020 - 2021 A' Design Award & Competition and was determined through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who assessed anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.

About the Bronze A' Design Award

The Bronze A' Design Award is given to outstanding designs that showcase a high degree of creativity and practicality. It recognizes the dedication and skill of designers who produce work that stands out for its thoughtful development and innovative use of materials and technology. These designs are acknowledged for their professional execution and potential to influence industry standards positively. Winning this award highlights the designer's ability to blend form and function effectively, offering solutions that enhance people's lives and wellbeing.

Regarding DefeXtiles Textile Fabrication

DefeXtiles is a technique for producing thin, flexible textiles on standard 3D printers. The method controls under-extrusion so that small globs form with fine strands between them. The resulting periodic gaps give the printed fabric a textile-like appearance, breathability, flexibility and stretch, even with rigid materials such as polylactic acid. The textiles are printed perpendicular to the print bed, so pleated and curved forms can be made. Applications include garments, tangible interfaces and shuttlecocks. Conductive filament can embed circuit traces in the fabric.

About Jack Forman

Human-material interaction was a calling I have long been nurturing. It brought me to my bachelor’s Carnegie Mellon University, where I double-majored in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Biomedical Engineering (BME), to learn more from nature’s demonstrations of what matter could be: programmable, adaptive, and responsive. After cultivating a solid technical foundation, I ventured from studying to making. In third and fourth year, I first-authored a CHI paper on a reversible morphing artificial muscle fiber [1].

Award Record

This recognition makes Jack Forman a winner of 2 A' Design Awards. All of the awards belong to the 2020 - 2021 edition of the A' Design Award & Competition.

About the A' 3D Printed Forms and Products Design Award

The A' 3D Printing Design Award is an international 3D printing design competition recognizing good 3D printed works by designers and creators worldwide. The competition is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to 3D printing designers, industrial design studios, product designers and 3D printing brands from all countries. Entries typically include products designed and realized with latest technologies, 3D printed products, prosthetics, architectural models, jewelry and furniture. Awarded 3D printed designs are published at https://dezigners.org/design-category/3d-printing

About A' Design Award & Competition

A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade organized annually since 2008. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The A' Design Award has a philanthropic mission to advance society through good design by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously evaluated by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. The A' Design Prize granted to eligible laureates includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, the upload of a work and the preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. Further information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com

Press Resources

Media Contact

Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953

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Fact Sheet

The Work

Project
DefeXtiles Textile Fabrication
Function
Textile Fabrication
Category
3D Printed Forms and Products Design
Discipline
Industrial Design
Industry
Manufacturing and Innovation
Colors
Gray, Dim Gray, Rosy Brown, Dark Slate Gray and Dark Gray
Images
5
Client
Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab

The Recognition

Laureate
Jack Forman
Country
United States of America
Recognition
Bronze A' Design Award
Edition
2020 - 2021
Design ID
#112633

Credits

Team
Jack Forman, Mustafa Doga Dogan, Hamilton Foryseth and Hiroshi Ishii

Design Details

Unique Properties
DefeXtiles is a rapid and low-cost technique to produce realistic high-fidelity textiles on 3D printers. In this work, we demonstrate that under-extrusion defects can be finely controlled to quickly print thin flexible textiles into complex 3D shapes. Our approach enables a myriad of applications including printing full sized garments, deformable tangible interfaces, and ultra-tough shuttlecocks.
Inspiration
For thousands of years, the manufacturing of textiles into shaped forms has remained largely the same; fiber becomes a fabric which is then constructed into a 3D object. The high-tech approach, machine knitting, uses expensive machines with a significant learning curve for use. The low-tech approach, classic sewing, requires painstaking processes. As such, there is a need for a fast and accessible approach to manufacture textiles into 3D forms.
Research
We present a new strategy, called DefeXtiles, to 3D print quasi-woven fabrics that are thin, flexible, and fast to fabricate. Since our approach prints the textiles perpendicular to the print bed, complex geometries can be produced including pleated, curved, and metamaterial structures. With our approach, a standard 3D printer can print decameters of fabric in a single print. The use of multi-material printers allows users to embed circuit traces into the textile via conductive filament.
Challenge
To democratize access and ability to make 3D forms with textiles by developing a new technique that allows textiles to be 3D printed into complex 3-dimensional forms using unmodified commodity 3D printer and no new software.
Realization and Technology
In this paper, we demonstrate that under-extrusion can be leveraged to quickly print thin, flexible, textiles. Specifically, as the extrusion multiplier decreases, there exists an ideal regime where globs form with fine strands connecting them. The periodic gaps that arise from printing this way not only yields textile-like aesthetics and breathability, but also textile-like properties such as flexibility and stretchability even with classically rigid materials such as polylactic acid (PLA).
Operation and Interaction
This work has introduced a new approach to quickly print thin, flexible textiles composed of common 3D printing ma-terials with an unmodified 3D printer. Our approach com-bines the flexible, thin, and breathable properties of textiles with the affordances of 3D printing: rapid iteration, hands-free fabrication, and computer aided design. Through char-acterization, we demonstrate how our approach enables tun-ing of the mechanical and aesthetic properties through mate-rial and parameter selection. Through a series of applica-tions, we demonstrated the potential applicability of our approach for smart textiles, tangible online shopping, toys, fabric design, and everyday life.
Project Duration and Location
Started in October 2019 in Cambridge Massachusettes, and finished in June 2020. The work will be presented and demoed at the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium 2020.
Keywords
textile, 3d print, lace, advanced manufacturing, fabric

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