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Full Printed 3D - selection of "Tuber luminaires" for group exhibition and subsequent acquisition

Full Printed 3D represents a comprehensive study of the creative use of 3D printing. The original exhibition ran for 17 months; works were then selected for a permanent collection. The permanent collection has since toured to Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. The work exhibited in this exhibition demonstrates the creative potential of additive manufacture and the added ‘value’ that can be ‘designed into’ artefacts.The Tuber luminaires selected for this exhibition demonstrate that it is possible to generate significant numbers of design variants through the use of parametric CAD based computer animation. The physical pieces created are 3D printed from CAD data derived from discreet animations frames. The design illustrates that a brand identity can extend across families of variants and that exclusive, personal; products can be produced on an industrial scale. The selection of Tuber for this exhibition and the subsequent acquisition of a set of pieces, is important in that it marks the significance of the design in both the rise of 3d printing and the creative use of digital design and manufacturing technologies more generally.

Other practitioners have employed animation and computer scripts in this way (the author was among the first) but without the same emphasis on maintaining a coherent design identity across the iterations generated: an important factor in design as opposed to art/craft applications. In the acquisition the DHUB curator particularly wanted a set of the original designs with the finish they had been presented in at the time. This was to document the position of this work in the development of digital design and manufacturing.