Steelcase, one of the largest office furniture firms in the world, has partnered with MIT to create a new form of 3D printing that it believes could potentially change the way that furniture is designed and created.

3D printing has struggled to take off in any meaningful way in the consumer goods industry, after a groundswell of hype. Most traditional 3D printing methods tend to be very slow even with small objects and use impractical materials, and the finished products often are pretty rough around the edges. While there have been some improvements in speed by companies like Carbon (which is working with Adidas to print soles for its next generation of sneakers), many printers are still limited by the fact that they have to lay down layer after layer of material to build up their items.

A collaboration between Self-Assembly Lab + Christophe Guberan + Steelcase In collaboration with Steelcase, we are presenting a new experimental process called Rapid Liquid Printing, a breakthrough 3D printing technology. Rapid Liquid Printing physically draws in 3D space within a gel suspension, and enables the creation of large scale, customized products made of real-world materials. Compared with other techniques we believe this is the first development to combine industrial materials with extremely fast print speeds in a precisely controlled process to yield large-scale products. 3D printing hasn’t taken off as a mainstream manufacturing process for three main reasons: 1) it’s too slow compared to conventional processes like injection molding, casting, milling, etc. 2) it’s limited by scale – although it’s good for creating small components, it’s not possible to produce large scale objects 3) the materials are typically low-quality compared to industrial materials. Rapid Liquid Printing addresses all of these limitations: it is incredibly fast (producing structures in a matter of minutes), designed for large scale products (you can print an entire piece of furniture) and uses real-world, industrial-grade materials. Self-Assembly Lab Team: Kate Hajash, Bjorn Sparrman, Mattis Koh, Schendy Kernizan, Jared Laucks & Skylar Tibbits In collaboration with Christophe Guberan Steelcase Team: Yuka Hiyoshi, Rob Poel, Markus McKenna, Paul Noll, Sharon Tracy, Edward Vander Bilt, Chris Norman & Charlie Forslund

Via qz.com