#HTE

Printflatables: MIT’s New Design & Production Process Uses Thermoplastic Fabric and Air

A group of students at MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group has created a new design and fabrication system that they call Printflatables. Their system can produce “human-scale, functional and dynamic inflatable objects.” If that doesn’t sound exciting, well, take a look at some of the potential applications:

Printflatables from Tangible Media Group on Vimeo.

We use inextensible thermoplastic fabric as the raw material with the key principle of introducing folds and thermal sealing.

Upon inflation, the sealed object takes the expected three dimen- sional shape.

The workflow begins with the user specifying an intended 3D model which is decomposed to two dimensional fabrication geometry. This forms the input for a numerically controlled thermal contact iron that seals layers of thermoplastic fabric.

I for one am eager to see more of those human-power-augmenting applications. I’d love to see some designs that could help the arthritic and/or disabled.

http://www.core77.com/posts/68743/Printflatables-MITs-New-Design-n-Production-Process-Uses-Thermoplastic-Fabric-and-Air