Last day started with Cardboard Furniture and Projects, an eco-friendly and innovative furniture design company based in Madrid. They explained how new technologies enable new products. In such sense, the base material of their products is a more rigid, lightweighted and strong kind of cardboard called Re-board that they cut using tools like a Zünd digital cutter. They produce on-demand and in small scale highly resistant and adaptative furniture for home, office, fairs and exhibitions.
Inma León from Cardboard Furniture and Projects
Directly inspired by the noted Italian designer and Open-Source furniture pioneer Enzo Mari, the Madrid/Roma based company mmodulUS invited us to hack furniture and enjoy the co-creation experience. Advocates of new sharing economy, they make modular and reconfigurable furniture for people willing to participate in the creation of their own day-to-day spaces.
On Saturday, the Design & Digital Manufacturing event Replic_age started with Martín Sáez from the Belgian company Materialise. Counting with more than 20 years of experience in business, they gave us a solid and realistic vision about professional 3D printing, emphasizing the idea of that 3D printers are being used from a long time in industry.
Next on stage was the Dutch independent researcher Peter Troxler. He is an ideologist, a theoretician of Open Source, mainly applied to Design. He delivered a magnificent Lecture brimming with persuasion and deep considerations. Troxler stressed the importance of a sense of responsibility within the Maker Movement, as we shall go beyond the simple consumerism and banality. Open Source was outlined not only as a good faith answer, but also as a reliable business option. Also, he brilliantly explained the basis of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, condensing the main ideas from a wide intellectual corpus written around this concept. In short, Troxler exhibited in front us us the multiple elements which act in the creation of this new context: from the tight relationship between renewable energies and communicating technologies as Internet, to the new cooperation relationships and useful development. He was so gentle to grant an interview after his speech, that we will publish in a later post.
Peter Troxler at Replic_age 2014
After a short break, the artist potter Jonathan Keep came on stage. He explained detailedly how he achieved to make porcelain pots using 3D-printing techniques. Since such printers for clay didn’t exist by then, he even had to make his own, using pieces of several sources. He designs by coding trying to emulate the way Nature works.
So we have come to Madrid to attend to Replic_age, the Design & Digital Manufacturing event happening from 23rd to 25th May at Matadero Madrid. The event is organized by DIMAD and Makespace Madrid and has 2 areas: Fair and Fest.
Fair is the area open to the general public, where people of all ages can interact with the latest advances in digital fabrication as well as knowing what fab labs and universities are working on this matter.
On the other hand, Fest is the festival featuring presentations and lectures of renowned professionals, along with workshops and networking opportunities for attendees.
On Fest stage, Daniel Pietrosemolli introduced Medialab-Prado to the audience, a city-funded organization that promotes digital culture. The “citizen laboratory” is placed in an old wood sawmill reconverted into a modern fab lab. They offer helpful services to anyone with a digital fabrication project in mind.
Daniel Pietrosemolli from MediaLab-Prado on stage
After that, Sara Alvarellos presented Makespace Madrid, a new space dedicated to digital fabrication that is sustained by its own members. Their complete digital fabrication equipment is available to all the members of the community. Here, more information about membership.
Postdigital Node 