ABSTRACT
Hyperform, the winner of the Next Idea Award at Ars Electronica 2013, was a project undertaken in collaboration with Marcelo Coelho and Formlabs. This project addresses the problem of increasingly small 3D print volumes by identifying a computational and material folding strategy that could allow large-scale objects to be compressed into a minimal volume to maximize the printing capability of desktop 3D printers. While 3D printers are becoming increasingly accessible and capable of rivaling the quality of professional equipment, they continue to be limited by smaller and smaller print volumes. Hyperform offers a new design strategy for relocating density from large objects into small, densely packed, volumes that can be printed, and then reconfigured into large, functional, objects. A full print volume could be printed and then removed from the machine, manually pulled out of the support structure, and it would contain all of the necessary information to instruct someone to build any desired shape.
