Prof. Kristina Shea
ABSTRACT
The recent rise in digital fabrication technologies and materials, including Additive Manufacturing (AM), may be the best thing that has ever happened to increase the impact of computational design methods and tools. Designers struggle to design parts by hand that take full advantage of the variety of complex shapes that are now possible and the new and different material combinations. From a computational design point of view, finally we can more readily fabricate the complex, customized parts that we can compute. But it goes further than this and opens new avenues for fabricating novel composite materials and active elements. Design is chang- ing. New challenges need to be addressed including defining representations, searching vast design spaces, and characterizing AM processes, new materials and their combinations. Highlights of our research on novel computational design methods for automatically generating, optimizing and directly fabricating structural and mechanical systems are discussed focusing on multi-material printing and end-use, functional parts rather than prototypes alone. This includes testing and characterization of polymer-based AM processes and integration of resulting models in novel computational design and optimization methods. Cutting-edge applications inves- tigated include lattice structures, customized consumer products, biomedical devices and robotics.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
14th International Design Conference, May 16 - 19 2016 Cavtat, Dubrovnik, Croatia
The video of the keynote is available here Link