Technology Is A Portal To The (Hopefully Comfortable) Future

Yes, it’s a chaise lounge. And it was built by a 3D printer. For pioneering furniture designers, the technology is a portal to the (hopefully comfortable) future.

- Helena Madden

AUDREY LARGE WAS never too keen on making things by hand. As a master’s candidate at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands in 2017, she and the other students were pushed into metal or wood workshops, but her preferred method was to create designs on a computer. The catch was how to turn these digital drawings into physical objects; 3D printing bridged the gap. Instead of meticulously tufting a rug or moulding a porcelain jar as she’d tried to do in the past, Large found she could simply hit ‘print’ for her virtual object to become reality. But the technology didn’t impress her much at first. “I felt it was kind of ugly,” she says of the outcomes. “Never as seducing as the shapes I had in my computer.”

Even so, the promise of circumventing the artisanal aspect of the creation process was too great, so she kept at it. Trial and error became an important part of her work. Large would intentionally run designs through the printer that were structurally unsound to test the device’s limits. When she got stuck, she consulted YouTube and online forums. The final bowls and vases she developed look like they’ve been ripped straight from the colourful digital realms of Tron or Ready Player One. “There’s no painting, there’s no coating on the object,” she says. “I like that it’s coming out of the computer, out of the machine. I take it out and I don’t touch it so that it’s closest to the file.”