TAKE YOUR FUTURE LIVING IN YOUR HANDS
From 3D Printing and E-Textiles to Programming

Digital Fabrication Weekend in Haus Esters

Against the backdrop of the Bauhaus anniversary, it is also worth taking a look at the present and the future. What remains from the notion of the transdisciplinary work community in which things are supposed to be fundamentally reconceived and redefined?

This lead to the idea of a “Digital Fabrication Weekend in the Museum” encompassing lectures, exhibition objects from the two fabrication laboratories at the Ruhr West and Rhein-Waal Universities and practical workshop stations with typical contemporary digital production manufacturing methods.

Our museum visitors could register for thematic islands that increasingly shape our everyday lives. The “3D Food Printing Workshop” invited participants to try out pancake and chocolate printers for the first time as an example for the upcoming gradual entry of digital manufacturing methods into the kitchen. In “Smart Textiles,” the qualified designer Adriana Cabrera taught the attendees about CNC-controlled embroidery technology, the digital production of interlock fabrics and the inclusion of electronics in clothing. The thematic island devoted to “3D printing” provided insights into an inexhaustible spare parts depot and the rapid realization of one’s own ideas as three-dimensional products. Following up on this, visitors had the chance to scan a three-dimensional self-portrait and print it as a bust. The final station demonstrated the power of the changes in perspective through drones, a controversial but fascinating technology.

The lecture “Industry 4.0 at first hand in the Bauhaus Year” held by Prof. Dr. Michael Schäfer (HRW Bottrop) opened the weekend with an analysis of present day digital production possibilities for domestic purposes. The qualified industrial designer Aleksandra Konopek (HRW Bottrop/ HBK Essen) drafted a future scenario in her concluding lecture “Effects of the Maker Movement on Society, or the Entropy of Form,” the origins of which Konopek traces back to Industrialization, the Arts and Crafts movement and finally in Bauhaus.

Aleksandra Konopek