03 Oct Betascape 2012
2012 marked the third year of Betascape, the annual weekend gathering of artists and technologists (some may say nerds) from the Baltimore area to explore the intersection of their disciplines. This year, the event was held at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in downtown Baltimore, an apt location for delving into creative thought.
In the afternoon participants broke off into one of three “exploratoriums” (aka workshops) centered on the topics of physical computing, data visualization, and digital fabrication. Each day began with interesting presentations from local and national speakers including Nathalie Miebach – a data visualization artist, Marco Perry – co-founder of PENSA and an inventor of the DI Wire Bender, Nervous System – a generative design studio inspired by science, art, and technology, and Hod Lipson – Associate professor and director of Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab.
Due to my involvement in product development and electrical hardware design, I was most inspired by Dr. Hod Lipson’s presentation on the present and future of 3D printing. Perhaps the most mind blowing concept presented was the idea of printing on the micro-scale level with a variety of multi material 3D pixels which Dr. Lipson referred to as “voxels”. Voxels could be insulating plastics, conductive blocks, complex programmable or sensor based pieces, or even batteries. The implementation of voxels could revolutionize the way product designers think about and create objects. For example, the majority of PCBs I’ve designed are built on a rigid 2D surface. Over the past few years, flexible PCBs have allowed designers to pack circuits into tinier packages. However, these flex boards are limited to bending in a single plane and are further limited in bending by the number of metal layers in the stackup and the thickness of the materials. Now imagine being able to print a circuit in a 3D grid structured like a micro Rubik’s cube! Entire circuits, not just traces, could be designed to wind and weave around obstacles.
Voxels would also completely transform the manufacturing process. Currently, a bare PCB is fabricated, populated with components, and then integrated into a device assembly. Voxel printers could simplify human interactions in manufacturing to the press of a button that instructs the 3D voxel printer to assemble a multitude of prefabricated voxels into a final device. And maybe at the end of printing that device will be able to walk off the printer…
Pretty rad.
