Last year I got to attend an exhibition at the London Design Museum in the comfort of my pyjamas. No, I wasn’t testing the dress code or parameters of social etiquette, this was the product of a recent Dassault Systèmes collaboration featuring 3D printing, new materials, and a virtual twin environment that allowed me to take in a new art installation from the glow of my laptop screen.
It’s called AURORA which, in addition to being the name of a striking light phenomenon, also translates to “new dawn” and is precisely what the project’s collaborators hope to inspire for the future of design.
“We spent some time discussing this name, this new dawn about how we can leverage technology in the design process,” Anne Asensio, VP Design Experience at Dassault Systèmes and head of the Design Studio, told TCT from a more familiar virtual environment: a Zoom call. “It's also an optimistic view of the future. We wanted to promote our human approach to technology, and overall demonstrate where technology is not just given, but could be a great means to address those very important changes that are ahead of us.”
Arthur Mamou-Mani, renowned architect and AURORA designer added from a different Zoom window: “I think we both wanted to have a notion of what's next and what's after COVID? What's after this crisis?”
It’s a question touching most industries as the impacts of the pandemic continue to ripple through supply chains and day to day life, but one the collaborators feel creatives and designers, given the right tools, could be uniquely equipped to answer.
AURORA takes the form of a series of waves, or modules, manufactured locally at Mamou-Mani’s FabPub in London with 3D printing in bio-sourced PLA, and suspended in the air using steel tubes. It’s the third instalment from Dassault Systèmes’ Design in the Age of Experience initiative, developed within its own cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform, and forms part of the Design Museum’s “Waste Age: What can design do?” exhibition, exploring design’s role in sustainability.
Describing how the two came to work together, Mamou-Mani recalls how they were each “at the crossroads between tech and the circular economy,” with a need to make technology “purposeful, as opposed to just for its own sake.”
Asensio elaborated: “It's more about collaboration, experimentation with like-minded people, looking at a very important challenge that is, in this case, waste, but it was really about creating the condition of the best collaboration.”
AURORA modules 3D printed in bio-based PLA
AURORA’s modules are said to have been inspired by a dry cactus and the movement of its cellular structure. Initially designed in 3D, the team then used Dassault Systèmes’ xGenerative Design to build the larger architectural structure before creating a virtual twin experience that places AURORA within a live model of the Design Museum. It’s here where the team were able to simulate the effects of elements such a lighting and airflow to inform AURORA’s design – and also how I got the chance to visit and interact with the installation remotely.
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The modules were printed using a PLA made from potato starch, chosen not just because of its biocompatibility, but the ease at which it can be crushed back down and re-used for further 3D printing, taking advantage of the material’s unique aesthetics.
“When it comes to working with a material that's quite new and therefore quite whimsical, the material does its own thing. If one does not adapt their own ideas to that material then it can be very challenging,” Mamou-Mani explains, pointing to a shelf in the foreground featuring an array of trials and test prints. “When we worked with the PLA bioplastic, it did its own thing, and the machine also had its own way of working. So it is kind of upside down where the machine tells us what it wants, the material tells us what it wants, and then we adapt to that as opposed to the other way around.”
Using Life Cycle Assessment solutions within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the collaborators discovered they were able to save six tons of CO2 using this material compared to petroleum- based plastic. But this material choice, even with its clear advantages, also highlights how there’s no one size fits all solution to sustainability.
“There's this big contradiction that's worth highlighting between something that's durable, i.e., sustainable, and something that you want to biodegrade, i.e., disappears,” Mamou-Mani explained. “What I like about PLA is that it sits right in the middle, it can disappear if you put it at the right conditions but it won't do it on its own so that means that you can activate the biodegradability. Or you can let it last for a long time.”
Dassault Systèmes’ Anne Asensio and architect Arthur Mamou-Mani with 3D printed AURORA module
The words ‘exploration’ and ‘experiment’ come up a lot during our conversation. ‘An interactive experimentation of how we can achieve a more sustainable approach to life in the future,’ reads the description on the Design Museum’s website, and Mamou-Mani is open about the fact that before meeting with Asensio’s team, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform was a completely new way of working for the studio, requiring a “process of discovery.” But Asensio is keen to emphasise the flexibility the platform provides for designers, and how creativity can encourage different ways of seizing the technology, resulting in new solutions to challenges.
“Technology is often seen as very rigid, dogmatic, driven by a deterministic approach,” Asensio explained. “That’s not our way of doing it. We see the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a very open, easy, collaborative virtual workshop. And it's nice to actually trigger those questions of what do we observe in nature? How can we translate that into a technological application and how can we play with it?
“We have done a lot of work with Dassault Systèmes to bring basically those very competent tools, considered too complex for designers, more accessible, more agile, to actually provide this quality for any architect to actually [make] their dreams come true. We cannot make circular design processes if the designers are not part of this process. So if we are looking at a circular design, concept and intention, if you don't have a tool that allows you to actually place this concept into the same environment where you can really test, simulate and make sure that concept actually has a circularity potential well, the design stays in the concept phase.”
Asensio notes the rarity of designers being able to chart the impact of their work, and the use of Life Cycle Assessment tools within AURORA’s iteration stages allowed for the team to think creatively but design with engineering intent, understanding the impacts of their design choices and how that may play out across a component’s lifespan.
“Sustainability is so layered that one cannot just say it's good or bad,” Mamou-Mani said. “There are several dimensions to that Life Cycle Assessment from water usage to transportation to the effect on your lungs when you burn it, or the toxicity of land, and what I loved about this project is we could dive deep into all these different dimensions.”
Commenting on the wider impact these learnings could have, Asensio added: “This is probably going to be a little revolution. But it will not just happen by just a tool or few designers or architects doing it, it has to be framed as something that may be a new way of approaching.”
Those sustainability considerations extend not only to the pavilion’s process and material choices but also AURORA’s own lifecycle.
Members of Dassault Systèmes’ design community have already begun coming up with new ways to repurpose AURORA’s individual modules to expand its life beyond the rafters of the Design Museum and drive that circular economy message even further.
“AURORA is not just an installation in the middle of the Design Museum in London, it is a metaphor of the way we may build,” Asensio concluded. “If we really bridge creative thinking, original thinking and those scientific tools, we are very optimistic that we may basically change the way we live, our surroundings, our everyday things.”
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