Project Goals

This project had the goal of creating a unique geometric design for an upcoming concept presentation to extend an existing accent collection. I was given a broad range of design freedom and chose to center the design about a 3D representation of Voronoi spacing algorithms.

Style

This project was meant to be geometric from the beginning—a term I’ve come to realize basically just means “strange underlying pattern apparent”—though the end result evolved on its. This project wasn’t meant to represent a manufacturable design initially though it seemed that a cast aluminum would be a conceivable approach. With this in mind, the materials used were meant to simulate a dark brushed aluminum and the entire lighting/texturing/rendering environment was meant to accentuate this.

A Table Formula

Parametric design offers the ability to create designs that can be quickly updated. I’ve found this is rarely cost-effective for product development workflows but in some cases—such as with this table collection—it works out! My first approach to this project was to create a series of design instructions within the Grasshopper3D plugin that defined how these tables would take shape.

I built everything around Grasshopper’s Voronoi spacing component and made accommodation for things like a chamfered edge on the glass tops, variation in shelf size and spacing, and also a parameter to generate another random version. Once this “table formula” was created, I was able to quickly generate as many variations as I wanted simply by plugging in dimensions.

This project was for a conceptual presentation that ultimately did not lead to manufacturing. I was able to retain the rights to the design and have posted several versions of these tables on this website as free 3D model downloads. Below are some select images showcasing different size and parameter variations that were generated during this project.