3DP Applications

Design With Your Voice – Makoo's Jewellery App

Makoo is another new DIY (Design It Yourself) 3D printing jewellery project to pop up from the old world. However, the fashion-oriented Italians behind the company haven’t exactly settled for the most conventional solutions when outlining their core processes – ensuring the user has more besides the basic changing of the material, colour and size of the ring or other piece of jewellery. The fresh approach that Makoo’s proposition is based on relies on combining some interesting code with design functions to give the user – in practice the user’s voice – the reigns to go wild. The idea is to record a short voice message with Makoo’s software, which an algorithm then converts to a specific shape accordingly.

Besides the actual words and their pronunciation, emphasis is also placed on the intensity of the aspiring designer’s voice, as it carries most of the shape forming responsibility. After the basic shape of the piece is created, the user can then also modify the thickness, height and torsion of the 3D model. Check out the short (1 min) video of the process below.

The alpha version of the software can already be tested on Makoo’s site (if you don’t mind running a bit of Java on your computer and a subscription to Makoo’s newsletter). The complete version that will include all the physical 3D printing bells and whistles is to follow, but already the app seems to be working just fine and enabling the creation of quite nice looking 3D models – even with my native, very consonant-heavy and ‘angular’ Finnish – so there’s hope for everyone in this matter. The limitations of a person’s language might still bring limits of that individual’s world, but projects such as Makoo have at least the potential to provide the tools needed for everyone, regardless of their background, to expand their design language vocabulary with a hands-on approach.

Source: Makoo Jewels