Interestingly, a lot of 3D printing projects begin as Proxy Design Studio’s does, “we wanted to [do something] with 3D printing”, as though the reasons for using the technology are taken for granted. But this is a problem I find with so many activities in life, that the reasons behind them are taken for granted. Why choose 3D printing? If a company advertising its new 3D printed product has a good answer to that question, then its product is more worthwhile than most of the stuff out there. Proxy Design is one company that does seem to have a good answer with their 3D printed toy, the Mechaneu v1.
The Mechaneu v1 is a hollow ball made up of interlocking gears. When you twist one gear, the whole thing shifts. In designing their v1 gear system after concepts found in the biological world, the team behind it managed to embrace one of nature’s defining principles, (as put by Buckminster Fuller) “doing more with less.” Toru Hasegawa, Designer and Partner at Proxy Design Studio, explains that only with 3D printing could they create a toy that uses the least possible material to achieve the greatest possible complexity:
In nature, shape is cheap and energy is expensive. Nature solves many problems through shape alone, using material only where needed and taking out where unnecessary. This is a strategy you find over and over in the natural world, leading to complex geometries such as bone structures. We used this same logic on every part of the Mechaneu to create a porous object that feels completely solid.
Proxy Design wrote custom software that generates shapes based off of the above principles, an algorithm that models cellular growth patterns to make the Mechaneu porous and patterned. They also had the goal of creating an object limited to 64 MB and 1 million polygon faces, a constraint they explain is placed on many 3D printer files. Like many complex 3D printed objects, the Mechaneu is printed as one single, intricate piece. Though the approximately 4” x 4” x 4” sphere is currently unavailable for purchase, when it is, you’ll be able to get your laser-sintered nylon ball in white, red, purple, pink or blue.
Ok, so the use of 3D printing for this project makes sense, but why make a gear-ball in the first place? Mark Collins, the studio’s other designer and partner, provides one answer:
Something happens between the hand and the brain when you pick up the object and start to engage the gears. It taps into a fundamental desire to see our actions multiplied and intensified. For me its somewhere between a tool and a toy. I pick it up when I’m thinking, talking on the phone or even frustrated. Like doodling on scratch paper, it takes away just enough of your brain that you open the door to calm, insight and reflection. We knew we were on to something when we couldn’t put the prototypes down.
That seems like a reasonable enough answer for a desktop toy/thinking tool, but it still begs the question of why humanity has evolved to make such tools in the first place. Perhaps Mechaneu v9999999 will be a mechanism not unlike the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey and, when twisted in the right way, the purpose for all creation will be revealed to us primitive apes. Then, and only then, will the reason for such a desktop toy become clear. Either way, Proxy Design Studio should still enter the GrabCAD Gears of Innovation Challenge.
Source: Proxy Design Studio
