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17. Wildcard week

This week’s assignment is about

Individual assignment

  • Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.

Assignment

Coffee-based biomaterial

For this experiment, I draw inspiration from two sources

Source: Materiom

Source: XYZAidan

Hence I decided to combine them to make objects from coffee-based biomaterial using 3d-printed moulds.

Tools and materials

Below are the key ingredients and tools required, in addition to a cooking stove. Except for the 3d-printed moulds, the tools required can be easily found in your own kitchen.

To print the moulds, you can download the .stl files provided the author of the instructables from this link The two designs I printed are Dish and Mt. San Antonio Topographic Map. 

INGREDIENTS

10g  glycerine
40g  gelatine
200g water
200g spent coffee ground

The above amount is enough to make a 2 dishes and 1 topographic map.

Cooking process

In a cooking pot, I mixed glycerine, gelatine and water before gently heating it on a stove, enough to melt the gelatine granules. To that clear liquid, I stirred in the coffee ground with a spatula and quickly mixed everything before removing from heat. The mixture is quite dry and would stick to the pot if cooking continued. The whole process took no longer than 5 minutes.

Moulding process

Next I assembled the bottom and wall moulds to make a dish and poured about a third of the mixture in. I then put on the top mould and pressed with as much weight as my hands can possibly muster.

When I removed the top mould, it did not come out quite cleanly.

Doesn’t this have the look of a moist and delicious brownie? Too bad it is not meant to be eaten. As you can see, the first moulded piece is not exactly well-shaped. I noticed two issues here:

  1. I put in too much coffee mixture, which leads to it oozing out at the bottom edge of the mould.
  2. Some material will stick to the underside of the top mould.

To improve on these, in the next edition, I made three changes:

  1. Manually shape the coffee mixture with my fingers, as the mixture is added, until the amount feels about right.
  2. Put a sheet of baking paper above the bottom mold
  3. Lightly oil the side and the underside of the top mould.

The resulting piece looks much better.

It was then left to air-dry. Unfortunately, after 2 days I realized that it has gone moldy and I had to throw it away.

Conclusion

In general, I think that coffee-based bio-material is fairly easy to make. However, in humid environment such as in Vietnam, it is best to dry the moulded material in an oven and on low heat to prevent mold from developing.

Modular fashion

Inspired by Fabricademy, I want to experiment with modular fashion concept. The idea is to create one or a few simple modules that can be cut and assembled into a complex pattern to make clothing.

My first brush with this was in 2019 when a previous Fabricademy alumni proposed this workshop at our lab but I have never got around to trying it. We happened to have an assortment of thin felt material donated by other projects / people, and I happily found a use for them in this project.

I started by designing the building block in Fusion 360 and eventually exported it in .dxf format.

Similar to my experience in Computer controlled cutting week, the dxf export from Fusion 360 is quite messy, with undesirable construction lines and disjoined path. Once again, I used MoI software to process it in order to create a lasercutter-worthy file.

After that, I designed and lasercut a collar as well.

The few first modules were put together.

Adding more modules, a mesh started to form.

After the initial assemble, I draped it on myself to see how it would look. Not bad, I think.

The final lookbook

This was a lot of fun to make. I had thought of assembling a more regular geometric pattern when I was designing the petal, but as I was in the process of doing that, there was quite a lot of room to play in terms of where the pieces can be placed and I kind of improvised as I went. As a result, the final assembly has some randomness to it which I think is delightful.

Files

Last update: July 31, 2022