Recent years have continued to prove the formidability of 3D printing technology; we have seen the additive manufacturing process making its way into our homes, jobs, products, and it has now even found its way into an exhibition within the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). MODA will be hosting their 3D printing exploration exhibition from September 20th up until January 10th of next year. The museum will reportedly present a mixture of both viewable and hands-on experiences with 3D printing technology, and will be looking at multiple facets of potential 3D printing applications, such as space exploration, architecture, and prosthetic devices. The exhibition, titled “Designers, Makers, Users: 3D Printing the Future”, will lead guests on a vast journey through the many ways we have used, and potentially will use, 3D printing as vehicle to recreate and redesign the world around us.
The exhibit will feature some pretty amazing 3D printing installations, including a space exploration exhibition that will showcase the attempts at 3D printing lunar habitats collaborated on by architecture firm Foster + Partners and the European Space Agency. MODA will also have the Made In Space Zero-G Printer on display, sent to outer space by NASA in 2014 in order to help International Space Station astronauts 3D print replacement parts, which will hopefully help to eliminate the stressful dependency on Earth to reliably send up necessary parts to them.
MODA will also be presenting the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s research on using 3D printing to manufacture organs that are safe and sustainable for the human body. In addition to the aforementioned expos, the museum will also explore the design of the 3D Print Canal House, an entirely 3D printed infrastructure being put together by DUS Architects in Amsterdam. MODA will also show off their fashion sense with Nervous System’s 3D printed Kinematics Dress, a complex design composed of thousands of interweaving parts.
In addition to these fascinating 3D printing exhibitions, MODA will also be hosting lectures, 3D printing workshops, and classes relating to the many fields that are represented in the 3D Printing the Future museum display. Claiming the belief that “design changes everything”, MODA seems to be placing a heavy wager that 3D printing technology will be on the forefront of that change. The museum curators want us to interact with and become accustomed to all the ways 3D printing will shape our society, whether that be through printing habitats in space, 3D printed houses on Earth, or organs that may eventually be used in our own bodies, MODA is making room for all of 3D printing’s inevitable innovations.
