Brave New World - Nagami Re-thinks Design in the New Age of Technology

Brave New World: Nagami Re-thinks Design in the New Age of Technology

At 2018 Milan Design Week, Nagami will make its official debut with a pioneering project, 'Brave New World: Re-thinking Design in the New Age of Technology,' combining computational design and large-scale robotic 3D printing. The project will launch four chairs by Zaha Hadid Architects, Ross Lovegrove, and Daniel Widrig.

The exhibition aims to provide a glimpse of tomorrow's most promising tech-savvy design products. "We design products that until now were just waiting for the right technology to come to life: not only objects that you can hold, but also that you can feel and experience as part of your environment," explained Nagami's founders Manuel Jimenez García, Miki Jimenez García and Ignacio Viguera Ochoa.

Bow & Rise

Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Design: Patrik Schumacher
Design Team: Sebastian Andia
Bow and Rise are the latest results of the extensive, ongoing research that Zaha Hadid Architects is conducting within the domains of 3D printing and material experimentation. These chairs combine pristine design informed by structural optimisation processes typically found in nature, with innovative materials and the most advanced fabrication methods. The pattern and the color gradient of both pieces concur in redefining the traditional spatial relationship between furniture and its setting. Bow and Rise have been printed with a pellet-extruder employing raw plastic particles rather than a filament. The chosen plastic is PLA, a non-toxic, biodegradable material from renewable sources such as corn-starch, which ensure lightness and stability.

Robotica

Designer: Ross Lovegrove
Robotica takes form at the convergence of two fields - botany and robotics - to coin a new approach to design that crystallises the natural programming in nature with that of robotics within artificial manufacturing. Built from a rotational geometry, Robotica presents an indirectly intelligible function. Thanks to its adaptable character, the high stool, which has 360° formal access, can also perform as a table upon which to place food that has just been taken out of the oven, due to its heat-proof silicone inserts in the seat, or as a plinth for a sculpture-TV, or even as a stand-alone aesthetic object, fulfilling any ancillary needs within a home.

Peeler

Designer: Daniel Widrig
Peeler has been conceived to overcome the limits of additive manufacturing, thus far serving small niche markets. Winking at mass production, it is 3D printed in single 7mm thick shells of PLA by an industrial robot in just a few hours, consuming a small amount of machine time with minimum waste of material. The chair has been designed to satisfy both the ergonomic constraints of the human body, as well as the ergonomics of the robotic arm that prints it. Consisting of three undulating skinlike surfaces, Peeler emerges out of a convergence of human and machine requirements.