Lionel Theodore Dean: creepers.mgx

Lionel Theodore Dean: Tubers

UK designer Lionel Theodore Dean believes in complexity. His objects are defiantly non-square, often pushing the boundaries of the functional object categories all industrial design adheres (a lamp is a lamp, a chair is a chair.) His creepers.mgx is a good example. It’s a modular LED-based lighting system, where stems of flower-like shapes clip on to cables running from floor to ceiling. It references the way creeper vines infiltrate their surroundings. And like real plants, all the Creepers are unique in shape.

Working with rapid prototyping techniques like laser sintering as a designer-in-residence at the University of Huddersfield, Dean realized that these methods were fully capable of producing high-quality objects fit for the consumer market. Inspired by work being done on applying organic metaphors to architecture, he created the project FutureFactories and began designing his objects as parametric systems. A model has parametric constraints set by the designer, using randomness and evolutionary algorithms to produce a range of unique results from the same template. Coupled with the use of rapid prototyping, the result is a rapid manufacturing process that creates one-off design objects.

Dean is perhaps not the first to apply biological strategies to industrial design, but his work is significant simply because it isn’t virtual. The objects are very real, and have received a great deal of interest. Working with companies like Materialize.mgx (who sell the Creeper lamp) Dean is now working on making his vision of unique, evolved objects a reality.

Lionel Theodore Dean will show reproductions of his work in the Code as Method section of the Generator.x exhibition.

Relevant links:

• FutureFactories
• Paper on FutureFactories (PDF)
• Autonomatic symposium at the University of Falmouth, January 2005
• "An Evolutionary Architecture", book by John Frazer (freely downloadable)