Back at the beginning of the year we posted about an exhibition at London’s Design Museum called ‘Send to Print/Print to Send’ which included work from design studio Unfold.

In the last year the studio have been busily improving their work with 3D printed ceramic, which they print from an open source Rep-Rap machine which has been customised to fit a special ‘claystruder’ print head, with wonderful results.

To produce the prints the team have developed their own custom software, in their words:

The carafe is a story an-sich because 90 percent of the design in actually not done in 3d software but designed straight in vector tool paths, only the basic outside shell is a 3d file, all infill and the folded structure are designed using our own custom software called Gcode Stacker which takes SVG vector files as input and spits out Gcode. Every SVG layer is a Gcode layer. This gives finer control over machine paths and enables you to do stuff impossible in 3d>Gcode toolchains like for example intersecting lines.

Experiments are made in plastic and then a selection of these in porcelain, the goal being to create objects with a complex inner structure, but with a more organic shell like you might see in a plant cut through for example.

The results are truly beautiful, and we hope there is a lot more to come from Unfold.

To follow what they are up to visit their blog; which has more great photos (and is where these ones came from!),  or head to their website where it’s also possible to purchase a selection of the printed pieces.