DigitalPrototyping02

Teaming Up

Minnie and I decided to team up for this challenge and we quickly realized that we were interested in seeing how we could potentially use food waste and the biomaterial printer to create new products. Very quickly we landed on the idea of coffee grounds and this is when we started talking to Jorge and Oliver who also wanted to work with this. We decided to make a team of 4 to continue on this path with.

First Material Tests

We went back and forth about the ways we could use coffee grounds but in the end decided to combine it with clay as that could be a food safe option was fired and glazed. The first thing we tackled was understanding different ratios of clay, coffee and water and testing with a syringe to see how these ratios would perform. After coming in a few days later we noticed that there were two potential favorites to use. The others were either too grainy, too dry or too watery. These all led to crumbly products one dry or once that didn't extrude well.

Testing with the 3D Printer

THis was a task for us because for some reason the day we decided to print as the first of the class there were a hundred issues with the machine. This meant that we spent quite a lot of time the first day fixing the machine and understanding how the components work. By the time this was done we realized our material was too dry and even remixing it made it still too grainy and dry to print. We decided to focus on a recipe that used more clay then coffee and also alter the machine settings to have a wider nozzle and print slightly slower then normal. This for us yielded the best results.

Recipe 1

First recipe we used to create our first successful print was a combination of clay, water and coffee. This print dried by itself quite well and is currently waiting to be tested in the kiln. Due to the addition of coffee in the material it could become fragile as it is an organic compound that will burn.

The exact ratio was:
- 100 grams clay
- 40 grams coffee
- 50 grams water (this depends on dryness of coffee grounds and clay wetness)

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The Product

In the end due to the business of classes and deciding to focus my effort at the moment more on energy, the final result of this project was a twisted structural test. It held its shape well and over time has dried without the help of a kiln. The only thing is this means that it is not waterproof. In the future if we are to continue with this we need to understand how much coffee can be added to the clay and what could be used for the glazing process.

Reflecting on Digital Prototyping 2

While we never really continued with this process of creating a cup at the moment it is something I would be interested in researching in the future. How can we close the loop in such a way that people are interested in joining. There are some problems with using coffee and clay and that is that as coffee has different dryness levels the recipe must be altered to take in account ratios each time. This time we noticed it as the tests were done primarily with moist coffee, and then the next time we worked the coffee had completely dried which meant we needed to adjust the recipe.

All in all I feel that this seminar taught me about thinking how we can reuse organic components in a new way, and how we can use digital fabrication in such a way that it makes these ideas easy to prototype and play around with.