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Cyber Sculptors
Kram/Weisshaar's Robochop project
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KRAM/WEISSHAAR are digital designers of spaces, products and media. The company was founded by Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar in Munich and Stockholm in 2002. The office now employs designers, architects and engineers from Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the US and Japan.
Clemens Weisshaar (*1977, Munich), apprenticed as a metal worker, before studying product design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art in London. He was an assistant to Konstantin Grcic for three years before founding his first design office in 2000. He lives in Munich.
Reed Kram (*1971, Columbus, Ohio) holds a Bachelor of Science from Duke University and Masters of Arts and Sciences from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he was a founding member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Media Laboratory with John Maeda. In 1998 Kram founded his first office for design in 1999. He lives in Stockholm.
This year at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover – a major annual tech industry shindig – designers Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar of Kram/Weisshaar design studio reacted to the fair’s theme The Internet of Things, by creating Robochop for CODE_n: both as publicity stunt and powerful demonstration of the possibilities unleashed once advanced robotics and 3D-modelling software are hitched to the internet.
Essentially it involved four very large industrial robots let loose on 2,000 40x40x40 centimetre polystyrene cubes. The robots cut and shaped each cube into a unique design created by a member of the public – stools and tables, geometric polyhedrons and swoopy random forms – programmed using a 3D web app, accessible to all.
The robots could be watched live at the fair going about their business in this process of remote subtractive manufacturing – but with a hint of creative magic: like mechanical Michelangelos sculpting each block to reveal the hidden form within.
But this was no slow, delicate chipping away, more lambs to the slaughter: each block grasped by embedded pins and manipulated with ruthless efficiency over a hot wire cutting tool, cooled by cold, compressed air.
Each end result was later shipped to its creator – although why anyone would want a badly designed polystyrene chair is another matter – but the bigger outcome is a future where anyone can remote-access and programme heavy industrial manufacturing to design and produce for them in fab labs anywhere in the world.
(rgw) Photo: © Matthias Ziegler, courtesy KRAM/WEISSHAAR
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