CRITICAL MAKING STUDIO

Plotting a Spoonful Takeover

How modular can we make common household wares?

Concept vs. reality

As I have written about prior, this project is a continuation of an earlier project, creating a more modular and accessible home using CAD software and rapid prototyping. See proposal here:

The Parametric Home

Snags have been hit, of course. Losing access to the 3D printer in our studio due to Covid-19 campus shut-downs was a big one. Deciding to most likely forgo being able to print my prototypes for testing purposes has been the side effect. Finding my comprehensive limitations in Grasshopper, the Rhino plugin I was using for creating a more malleable CAD design, was another.

Spoon feeding the Rhino

I started with a simple tutorial in Rhino, in order to work through the logic in .gh. I quickly uncovered all of the gaping holes in my .gh knowledge, and how much more of a task this would be without following clear instructions, as I had in the past.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a… spoon?

After many, many hours in tutorials, even more failed attempted, and much head to wall banging, the instructor was able to give me a .gh base to work on and a direction to point myself in (thank you RJ!). In a way, it was deceivingly simple.

Just a little noodle, hanging out.

Draw a curve in Rhino. Link it to a curve back in .gh, and map points along the curve using the Points on Curve component that can be position adjusted along the crossbeam. Then mirror that curve twice, graft the tree (create multiple lists with one single item each), run the Arc SED (start, end, and direction) component to create the arcs.

Base for a .gh spoon.

Then flatten the tree (create one list with multiple items again), and use Sweep2 to sweep along the two rails and crossbeams. Adjust the tangent vectors (vector that is tangent to a curve or surface at a given point) using the Vector XYZ component. And voila! A spoon is born.

.gh base setup

Of course, while you could technically manipulate the curve itself, the location of the points along the curve, and had some limited adjustment capacities on the tangent vectors, this was a limited model.

.gh version, with increased tangent xyz vector control, extrusion, and fillets. Some bugs still present.

Taking this base, I was able to create 4 more Vector XYZ components, to correspond with the 5 points on curve sliders above. This allows for more control over the shape of each arc. I also extruded the Sweep2 component geometry, and started the process to fillet the edges for a cleaner look.

Rhino version, with increased tangent xyz vector control, extrusion, and fillets. Some bugs still present.

What’s next?

1. Get the fillet to work
2. Clean up the artifacts that still exist on the end points.
3. Create a bend at the base of the spoon and the handle (Bend Deform?).
4. Finalize spoon variations.