Tim Burrell-Saward

Filabot - personal filament maker for 3D printers

Filabot is a desktop extruding system, capable of grinding various types of plastics, to make spools of plastic filament for 3D printers. Not only is it user friendly, but it is also environmentally friendly. The Filabot can process things such as: milk jugs, soda bottles, various other types of plastics, and bad prints, to make new filament for a future print. Filabot will bring the real power of sustainability to 3D printing, allowing for a one stop shop to make anything.

Source: Filabot

Gilding the Lilly

“This is what differentiates the 1980’s from 1890, 1909, and even 1949 - the ability of industrial design and manufacturers to deliver goods that cannot be bettered, however much money you possess. The rich find their exclusivity continuously under threat….Beyond a certain, relatively low price point (low compared with other times in history) the rich cannot buy a better camera, home computer, tea kettle, television or video recorder than you or I. What they can do, and what sophisticated retailers do, is add unnecessary “stuff” to the object. You can have your camera gold plated.”

Peter Dormer, The Meaning Of Modern Design

New logo

A good six months ago I picked up Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, by R.L Gregory, at my local purveyor of fine second hand books. I duly got home and added it to the ever growing stack that makes up my reading list, finally getting round to reading it properly a month or so ago. Whilst reading the chapter on optical experiments carried out through the ages, I came across this;

It’s an illustration, presumably by  the author, of an experiment dubbed Pfister’s Hen. Here’s the authors description of the experiment;

Right-left reversing prisms were attached to the eyes of the hens by M.H. Pfister, who then observed their ability to peck grain. The hens were severely disturbed, and they showed no real improvement after three months wearing the prisms.  

Tiny goggles for chickens, that they were forced to wear until they were driven insane. You couldn’t make it up. This is just one of the incredibly malevolent experiments described in the book, others including kittens in baskets, frogs with rotated eyes and babies coaxed over seemingly bottomless pits. Herbert West has nothing on these guys.

I’ve been meaning to design myself a logo for a while now, as my name is a bit of a mouthful to most people. Something illustrative as opposed to abstract, that also had a bit of loose relevance behind it. Something I could draw by hand and leave a little rough around the edges. Upon seeing the illustration I knew I could use Pfister’s hen has a base, as a) it’s a beautifully weird image and b) I can sympathise with the notion of treading the unusual path in order to prove your theories. I should probably add that I most definitely don’t agree with what happened to the poor unfortunate chickens - that’s just messed up.

This is the image I ended up settling on, and here’s how I got to it;

Oh, and yes, I realise that my logo is a cock. Well done, have a biscuit.

The Middle Line

“Scott continued to package modernity in British traditionalism throughout his career. In his inaugural address as president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1933, when Britain was finally succumbing to modernism and the architectural profession was split by battling “trads v. rads”, he advocated a “middle line” of both embracing technological progress and the human qualities of architecture.”

Except from a Design Museum article on Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. This “middle line” applies to more than just architecture, it’s something that should to be considered in all facets of design.

IDEO Make-a-thon

A couple of weeks ago I attended the inaugural IDEO Make-a-thon at their Clerkenwell Studios. I’d actually visited the very same studio in my first year of university, as a wide-eyed and clueless design student, so it was nice to return as an equally wide-eyed and even more clueless designer.

Hackdays are typically fairly unstructured affairs, invariably ending up comprising 23 hours of messing around followed by one hour of frantic foam board bodging. Fun, but also entirely dependant on the time management skills of each individual. IDEO decided to run a tighter ship than most, opting for a more structured time schedule as well as putting an IDEO designer in with each team. The main difference from other hackdays I’ve been to previously was that prior to the event IDEO had defined topics for each team to explore, ranging from improving Boris Bike usability for tourists to redefining the concept of the village fête. IDEO had also partnered with Amnesty International, who supplied several briefs concerning the creation of tools and systems around the issue of unlawful detention. All of the briefs (see here) were centred on real world problems, which in my opinion is a great improvement on your typical hackday where participants usually focus on the how rather than the why.

My dubious background in product design and hardware hacking steered me to the physical briefs as opposed to those more suited to purely software solutions. This unfortunately meant that I wasn’t really suited to any of the Amnesty briefs, so in the end I opted to join a group working on the following brief;

Brief #8 – Postcode Gangs

Postcodes define neighborhoods of people who can be fiercely loyal to their specific plot in London. Sometimes this can lead to anti-social behavior, where postcard gangs form feral tribes and wreck havoc across postal borders.

Is there another type of gang behavior where we can tap into the fierce loyalty people have for their local neighborhood?  What does a Postcode gang stand for, what resources are there for people to get help and support. How many people in a postcode are elderly or vulnerable, how many are short of money and would be available to run errands. Sharing resources: how many have a hedge trimmer or a sowing machine. Sharing skills: teaching, language, music.

The task is to develop a service that allows people who live in a postcode to get access to local resources. To let people who live in the area find out about what is available in their area. And what can they do to help.

My group, comprising Andy Piper, Dan Watson, Haley Stopford, Victoria Brooks and IDEO’s Steve O’Connor, decided to look at addressing the lack of contact that often occurs between individuals who share a postcode. Through brainstorming we found that few of us really had any personal interaction with those who share our immediate geographic locations, and subsequently felt that we could well be inadvertently isolating ourselves from a rich network of potential relationships and opportunities. Our rough hypothesis was that by encouraging communication within a postcode, you might stand a chance of both enriching the lives of its inhabitants as well as increasing the notion of community. A postcode gang in a positive way.

We were only given a couple of hours for the first sprint, at the end of which we had decided to explore the use of existing public phone systems as a method of hyper local skill swapping. A barter system using an individual’s skillset as currency. It was a creaky concept at best, relying on users being confortable with picking up ringing public phones as well as striking up unsolicited conversations with complete strangers, but it did result in a frankly mind-blowing prototype – Karmaphone V1;

After going back to the drawing board for a sustained period of head scratching, we filtered down the essence of our original idea into something a little better defined. The overarching theme remained the same – using a centralized system to foster an introduction between an individual with a need with another individual who may be able to fulfill that need. Here’s how it would work;

Local residents would be encouraged to create a publically viewable profile, acting as an introduction to them, their skills and interests (I’m a member of these local groups, I know about planning rights in the area, I’m active in the music scene, I’m a local plumber, etc). These profiles would have to allow for sufficient levels of anonymity, but the idea would be for them to act as an introduction to your neighbors – who they are, what they do, what their interests are. The simplest option from there would be to have an online database of profiles, with the ability to contact individuals and strike up conversation. It could act as a hub for local groups and events – a village notice board if you like.

Being a make-a-thon, we needed to build something. We decided to stick with the idea of a public phone system, as the notion of having a street-level method of initiating conversation has a nice tangibility to it that online interaction methods perhaps lack. Karmaphone V2 came to exist as a phone booth of sorts, consisting of a searchable database of profiles with an attached handset. Passers by are free to search the database of profiles and find someone who might be able to help them with a query - where’s good to get lunch, what are the schools like here, tell me something about the history of this place. They select their profile of choice and the call is placed to the profile owner’s personal phone via the attached handset (the profile holders phone number would be hidden, protecting their anonymity). Provided the profile owner decides to take the call, a conversation can be initiated.

The physical prototype was built using an iPad 2, a Hulger style iPhone handset, an old box file, custom laser cut decals and rather too much foam board. The software, handled masterfully by Andy and Steve, was built on Twilio coupled with Skype. Andy’s write-up is here, in which he goes into more detail about the technical wizardry employed. The prototype was fully functional, with calls placed via the iPad being routed to our mobile phones. Andy even managed to work a custom Karmaphone jingle into the system. Our team won the best digital prototype award for the event, which is really all down to Andy and Steve’s work. Good job gentlemen!

Although the prototype was nicely built, and worked like a charm, there are obvious issues with this application. How do you stop the system from being abused (I’m not sure I could handle many calls at four in the morning asking for local kebab joints)? How do you protect the identity of both parties? How do you incentivise locals to produce and maintain profiles? That said, as a thought-piece it worked marvelously and has got me thinking about the notion of isolation in high population areas and ways in which technology might be employed to act as icebreakers between individuals.

With that I’m off to introduce myself to my neighbors. Finger’s crossed that none of them are psychos. 

“People crave the visceral experience. Our world is even more image-saturated today than it was 35 years ago. A new painting can be disseminated around the cultural stratosphere before it even hits the gallery wall. Everything can be found online. Well, almost everything.”

Suzanne Labarre, talking about Doug Wheeler’s SA MI 75 DZ NY exhibition at the David Zwirner gallery, NY.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of wonder, and how personally I rarely seem to find it in physical objects. Wonder is always the emotion I try to aim for in the installation projects I make - that very primal, joyous reaction of being presented with something unknown and being encouraged to explore. We don’t tend to experience base emotions like these nowadays, be it due to desensitisation or sensory overload, but I think it’s a vital part of knowing how our minds and bodies work, as well as how we fit into the space around us. I think some shed time is needed to explore this further… 

Common Sense

“We are developing mobile sensing technologies that help communities gather and analyse environmental data.”

Nice to see an IOT project with some meat on it’s bones - you can’t deny the almost immediate benefit communities would garner from systems like this. I know it’s only a prototype, but i’m not sure I could live day to day with such a big form factor for the portable unit. It’s true that miniaturisation would naturally happen with time, but perhaps splitting the sensors into individual units might be a better option. Eg badges that you pin to your jacket, with a larger unit placed in a pocket or backpack. No idea how they sensors would connect without requiring either wires or regular recharging though. Magic?

Still, this is definitely A Good Thing.

Common Sense

Making things the hard way

I think it’s fair to say that technologies for small scale manufacture (3D printing, rapid prototyping, additive manufacture, or whatever else you want to call it) are making the journey from niche to something approaching “mainstream” (whatever that is nowadays) a little faster than had been previously expected, at least in terms of interest if not yet mass adoption. Whilst I still have reservations of the likelihood of the tech reaching The Diamond Age dream of one-in-every-home anytime soon, the increasing number of printing systems in production is a clear sign of an emergent market in rapid growth. This is especially evident with the advent of “user-friendly” services like Cubify, My Robot Nation, Digital Forming and (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent) Shapeways who aim to reduce the cognitive load required to use the technology, thereby opening up the field to those who previously would have lacked the skills to participate.

Although the technology is perhaps still in its infancy in terms of print fidelity and material selection, it’s pretty much a certainty that these issues are currently being worked on, as they are the most immediately visible limitations from a potential customers point of view. They are the features that sell machines. That said, an additional limitation that doesn’t seem to currently get a lot of attention at the moment is the environmental implications of the technology. Now i’m perhaps known for being a little ranty when it comes to issues of responsible material choice, recycling and life cycles, but it’s important stuff and really shouldn’t be ignored. If everyone now has the ability to make their own things, then surely everyone should also be responsible for the things they make. If not, it’s entirely possible that the 3D printing “revolution” will be remembered not only for the products it creates, but also for the landfill it leaves behind.

Looking at the materials currently employed in the technology, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a problem to be solved - what happens to my printed object once I’m done with it, and what do I do with all the leftover scrap? At the moment, most domestic 3D printers use thermoplastics such as ABS and PLA. Plastics like this can be recycled, but the process is currently the same as the recycling of everyday rubbish plastics. You put your unwanted object in the recycling bin, it’s taken to a plant (provided your local government has a recycling program), it’s sorted by type (incredibly labour intensive, and probably entirely dependant on wether you’ve had the foresight to have built a PIC into your model), shredded (along with labels, dirt and other undesirables), separated from impurities (as best is possible) and then formed into pellets. Typically these pellets are then used for “second generation” products, as it’s unlikely they will be suitably pure to be used again in their original application. It’s a long, costly process, and one that ends in landfill no matter how many times the cycle is performed. As Michael Braungart writes in the preface to his book Cradle To Cradle: Re-making The Way We Make Things;

“…your plastic bottle becomes your parka…and in five years the parka goes to exactly the same dead-end cradle-to-grave where a few years earlier your bottle would have gone.”

So the ideal solution to this is to print using a material that can be fully, easily and infinitely recycled. Pure science fiction. Well, for the time being maybe. IBM are currently researching the development of biodegradable, organic plastics that can be broken down at molecular level and reformed into virgin material;

It’s pretty exciting to imagine a time when we can cook up our own plastics in an entirely closed loop system, without doing harm to the environment around us, but it’s clearly not a solution that’s likely to become feasible anytime soon. Perhaps another eventual solution could be the advent of high street 3D printshops, similar to todays reprographic shops. Maybe rather than individual households having desktop fabricators, instead we’ll find that professional fablabs become preferable - with better machines and specialist technical knowhow. Rather than having to learn software, as simple as it may end up being, you’ll instead pick a design from a library, have it customised to your wishes and then flawlessly printed from a large stock of materials. In this instance, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that a pro-fablab might have better systems in place for dealing with waste, perhaps even incentivising customers to bring back old prints in return for discounts on new things (this bit of future thinking © Bashford). Again, science fiction for the time being. 

So accepting the fact that we’re at the mercy of time until something like the above becomes reality, what is the solution? To stop making things? Not exactly. Back to Cradle To Cradle, where Braungart is talking about ways of approaching the issue of the greenhouse effect;

“Bill and I want to put questions like the greenhouse effect on the practical level of “let’s not be stupid”, rather than “be ethical.” 

The answer, in my humble opinion, is simply to slow down a bit. Be selective about what we chose to manufacture, and be informed about how we do it. I’m perhaps not talking about the domestic fabber who prints the odd replacement door hinge for her own use, but more the individuals who are using the tech as a start point for producing saleable products. It’s fantastic to see start-ups springing up around products that started life as rapid prototyping projects, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single one so far that appears to have given any thought to the implications of using physical materials at manufacturing scale. Not one that comes to memory has talked about the life-cycle of their product, the history of its materials, where mouldings are made and by whom, what happens when it breaks, wether it can be recycled and to what extent, what the company is doing to minimise or offset any waste caused by bringing the product in the world. Designer Chui Chui Tan touches on some of the “hidden” factors involved in physical manufacture in her recent talk at Interaction12. We’ve come a long way since the days of the Industrial Revolution, where ignorance masked the damage that manufacture can cause. We collectively know better than that now, so there’s really no excuse for turning a blind eye to the whole thing.

Dirk Vander Kooij’s growing furniture range, printed from old refrigerators, is an interesting case study (even if it is perhaps sat a little to far towards the ethical end of the don’t-be-stupid/\ethical seesaw, to be ideal for this post). Vander Kooij’s take on the issue of material cost was to tailor the design of an additive manufactured product range around a particular material, old fridges, fulfilling his desire to create whilst also avoiding using virgin materials. Clever;

The optimist in me hopes that concerns like those I’ve touched on above have all been carefully worked out by all designers of products currently available on the designer/maker market, but that they’ve chosen not to make the information available to their customers for one unknown reason or another. However I fear they’ve simply not been given consideration, with designers perhaps getting too wrapped up in the novelty of making to think about the bigger picture. As a consumer, I want to know what kind of footprint a potential product has. I weigh this information against the desire to own the product, and if the two don’t match up I move on. I work exactly the same way in the my own design work - I try to make myself informed about the materials I use, and where appropriate choose the lesser evils. Where waste in unavoidable, I make arrangements to offset in appropriate ways. For example, in the temporary installation project I made for Wikipedia last year, where thermal printers were really the only option available, we planted trees and reused the printed paper for other projects. It wasn’t ideal, but the issue was addressed and made visible instead of being ignored. It’s not about choosing not to make things, it’s about being able to make informed decisions as to why you’ve chosen to make them, then making those decisions visible to your consumers.

I’m talking about the physical act of making here, but I imagine a similar argument could well be applied to any emergent field that catches the public’s attention; everybody gets excited and rushes to explore what’s possible. That’s great, but when the field we’re exploring is as costly as manufacture, any steps we take should be really carefully considered.

I’m really excited about the possibilities that all of this new tech give us, as both a designer and a consumer, I just hope we don’t bury ourselves in junk before the really important stuff comes along.

New website(s)!

My sparkly new portfolio, journal and sketchbook sites are all finally live, with a wealth of shiny things to see on each. Feel free to have a peruse. Show your friends. Use it as an excuse to talk to that cute neighbour down the corridor. Whatever you do, let me know what you think of how it all looks and works.

I’m also now actively looking for new projects, so if you have a venture in mind that might benefit from the creation of something special in the realm of physical user interaction or data representation using networked objects and environments, be it architectural, industrial or branding, now would be a most convenient time for us to chat.

Alternatively, maybe you prefer to sit in the pub and draw pictures? Good news - I like doing that too! Hello!

The sites were designed and built through the blood, sweat and tears of the marvelous Sam Andrews, with a bit of additional UX wizardry from Ben Bashford. Join me in drinking a toast to them and their huge brains.