We present "Unmaking: Enabling and Celebrating the Creative Material of Failure, Destruction,
Decay, and Deformation."
In the 1960s, Gustav Metzger founded the Auto-Destructive Art movement as a reaction to the violence
and destruction of World War II. Auto-Destructive Art was proposed as a way for artists to create
powerful controversies, bringing destruction into the public's consciousness, and allowing
artists and spectators to form intimate relationships with the temporality of the art. Artists created
impressive public works with acid, fire, and machines. However, Metzger recognized the
limitations of the time. He called upon scientists and engineers to work alongside artists to
develop technology to more fully realize his vision.
Today, advances in design, Human-Computer Interaction, and digital fabrication have
enabled the creation of objects that artists of the sixties could only have imagined. Still,
the dominant focus in digital fabrication has been in making. Currently, software design
tools for 3-dimensional modeling offer making operations such as extrude, loft, and revolve.
Resulting models can be easily made with tools such as a 3D printer. And with that, the making
process is largely considered complete.
We propose that unmaking — the processes of destruction and decay that occur after
making — can and should be equally considered as part of the creative making process.
For this to happen, we will require new fabrication strategies, software design tools, and materials.
To allow practitioners to embrace unmaking in their designs, we need to enable a new
set of operations. We proposed an initial set of expanded design vocabulary, such as split,
bulge, sag, lean, shrink, dissolve, pit, and shed.
We'll now walk through an unmaking workflow that we have developed to operationalize splitting
and bulging.
Unmaking can be implemented with a variety of materials and fabrication strategies. The
strategy that we take as our example is to 3D print a model using a conventional plastic,
such as PLA, and selectively design in hidden chambers of an "active" material; here, we
use thermally-expanding microspheres, or TEMs. Upon heating, these microspheres swell like
balloons. By modulating conditions such as heating temperature and time, TEMs hidden
inside PLA objects create controllable unmaking effects as they expand within.
To enable the design of such objects, we created a software tool that is integrated into standard
CAD modeling software. Users may interactively design and visualize how they want their model
to split or bulge.
The tool automatically generates meshes that can be exported to standard slicing software
and converted into machine gcode for 3D printing.
TEMs come as a powder, so before printing, we mix TEMs with water into a slurry, which
we then load into a dual-extruder 3D printer alongside standard PLA filament.
The object directly after printing appears to be an ordinary 3D printed PLA piece. However,
when heated, the object will split or bulge as the designer specified, creating a unique artifact.
This example workflow only scratches the surface of what is possible with unmaking. By combining
different materials and fabrication strategies, we can design objects that have different
kinds of obscured, controllable unmaking potential that is realized post-making. A designer may
even build in hidden chambers of reactive materials that internally combine and trigger
unmaking when an object is handled in a particular way.
In addition to creating these unconventional aesthetics and new kinds of experiences with
digitally-fabricated objects, we believe that unmaking is also an important ally to sustainability
efforts. With the workflow we have presented, TEMs can be used to split a multi-colored
object into its constituent colors for easier recycling, or the technique may be used to
split an object into smaller but functional parts for reuse.
Moving forward, we hope that growing interest around unmaking will incentivize the development
of more materials that are optimized for unmaking. We envision that these are ones that will
be easily bio-degradable and compostable in our own homes without specialized industrial
processes. We see great potential to transform the black-box processes of composting and
recycling into a rich design opportunity that can be enjoyed by makers and spectators.
We invite you to join us in this celebration of unmaking.