Milan Furniture Fair 2012: Design Goes Digital CNC Wood Router

Milan Furniture Fair 2012: Design Goes Digital CNC Wood Router

Design is going through a digital revolution( cnc wood router laser cutting machine) with new materials and shapes created at the touch of a button, says Barbara Chandler.

The latest digital technology stole the show in Milan as the design world thronged to one of the world's most important furniture trade fairs, the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, now in its 51st year. The fair is accompanied by a mass of smaller events across the Italian city.

Internet-based "shared design" was the big buzz. It's the newest trend, according to Joseph Grima, editor-in-chief of the influential Italian magazine Domus, chatting live on the internet via the impressive pop-up studio of British webmag Dezeen.

Designers share their ideas by making them universally available via the internet (open-sourcing) where they can be used, improved or modified by other designers. Anyone can then download the plans for free, often including computerized templates that allow the item to be made locally using digital laser cutters, CNC routers or 3D printers. It's the new digital DIY.

Just how shared design can work was on show during a five-day event (hackedmilan.it) at Milan's major department store La Rinascente, where shoppers could witness the assembly of a "WikiHouse", designed by Architecture 00:/ of London.

To build a "WikiHouse" in a department store in Milan during the show week, volunteers downloaded component templates from the internet and had them cut in plywood by a digital wood cutter.

A team of volunteers downloaded digital templates for the building's plywood components, then had them cut locally on a digitally controlled woodworking machine( cnc wood router) before assembling the parts in the store. "Milan this year was more about ideas than products," says the event's organizer, Beatrice Galilee from Twickenham.

Elsewhere was Digital Forming's "co-design bar" — masterminded by Londoner Assa Ashuach — where you could adjust and customise designs to create your own version of, say, a lampshade or a pen, and then get it digitally manufactured and delivered to your home. This is a digital industrial revolution.

To Milan's transport museum, London's Tom Dixon brought two giant computer-controlled German metal punches to churn out flat metal shapes, which were bent into chairs and lights. Such machines can be programmed by teams of designers/developers working simultaneously in different countries. The resulting products can then be made anywhere, saving on transport costs and energy use by cnc wood router.