Digital biofabrication to realize the potentials of plant roots for product design
- PDF / 5,465,945 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 29 Downloads / 134 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Digital biofabrication to realize the potentials of plant roots for product design Jiwei Zhou1 · Bahareh Barati1 · Jun Wu1 · Diana Scherer2 · Elvin Karana1 Received: 11 June 2020 / Accepted: 20 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Technological and economic opportunities, alongside the apparent ecological benefits, point to biodesign as a new industrial paradigm for the fabrication of products in the twenty-first century. The presented work studies plant roots as a biodesign material in the fabrication of self-supported 3D structures, where the biologically and digitally designed materials provide each other with structural stability. Taking a material-driven design approach, we present our systematic tinkering activities with plant roots to better understand and anticipate their responsive behaviour. These helped us to identify the key design parameters and advance the unique potential of plant roots to bind discrete porous structures. We illustrate this binding potential of plant roots with a hybrid 3D object, for which plant roots connect 600 computationally designed, optimized, and fabricated bioplastic beads into a low stool. Keywords Plant roots · Biodesign · Digital biofabrication · Material-driven design · Living organisms
Introduction The cross-fertilization of biology with design and engineering offers new sustainable solutions and diverse forms of expressions for product design and fabrication [1–4]. This emerging practice suggests that the product is a co-creation of humans and living organisms, such as algae, fungi, bacteria and plants, in which the organisms might contribute as building blocks, material sources, energy generators and more [1]. Technological and economic opportunities, alongside its ecological benefits, point to biodesign as a new * Jiwei Zhou [email protected] Bahareh Barati [email protected] Jun Wu j.wu‑[email protected] Diana Scherer [email protected] http://dianascherer.nl/ Elvin Karana [email protected] 1
Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
industrial paradigm for the fabrication of products in the twenty-first century [5–8]. Biodesign, within the context of product design, builds upon the relatively established field of biofabrication, which has a long history in biomedical science and engineering [5, 9–12]. Researchers have achieved to embed cells of microorganism, animal and plant origins into a variety of scaffold using digital fabrication technologies (e.g. [4, 13–18]). Today, potential applications of biodesign vary from biological energy sources (e.g. microbial fuel cells) to bio (-degradable) materials, such as fungi-based leather (e.g. https: //www. mycoworks.com) and oil-free plastic and foam alternatives (e.g. https://www.bloomtreadwell.com). While the majority of the biodesign projects are still at an experimental scale, recent initiatives of biodesign companies such as Ecovative, MycoWorks, MOGU and Modern Meadow for sca
Data Loading...
