Materialise UK Ltd has used their expertise in Additive Layered Manufacturing to produce the intricately designed trophies that were presented to the winners of the recent Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2011 awards.
The trophies were a creation of the London-based artist Ross Lovegrove, known by some as Captain Organic. The artist blends a love of high tech with inspiration from the principles of evolution and microbiology, and there was a requirement that the innovative trophy is a perfect combination of organic beauty and modern technology.
Materialise and Lovegrove have worked on numerous projects together, so when approached by the Design Museum to design the trophies Lovegrove automatically thought of the Low Volume Manufacturing capabilities of Materialise. In depth discussions between the Design Museum and Materialise resulted in 10 trophies being manufactured using the selective laser sintering methods.
Having the largest in-house capacity in Europe, Materialise manufactured the trophies within seven days, ready for the clear casing to be produced.
British designer Samuel Wilkinson and product design company Hulger won the overall Design of the Year award for The Plumen 001, their stunning redesign of the low energy light bulb. Beating over 90 entries to claim the winning title, the imaginatively sculpted energy saving light bulb, with its unique silhouette and organic form was chosen as the overall winner from the seven category winners. The full award categories included; architecture, fashion, furniture, graphics, interactive, product and transport.
Philip Hudson, Managing Director of Materialise UK said
We were pleased to be contacted by Ross (Lovegrove), and are delighted to produce the trophies for such a globally significant design award competition.
The intricacies and detail of the design gave us a great opportunity to showcase the capabilities of our additive manufacturing processes, and demonstrate that our world-leading technology can allow truly unique one-off pieces and short production runs to be accurately and cost effectively produced.
Materialise UK, based at the Advanced Manufacturing Park (AMP) in Rotherham, has the largest capacity of rapid prototyping equipment in Europe. The advantages of additive manufacturing have been used by Materialise to develop unique solutions that make a world of difference for its many customers with their prototyping as well as production needs. These customers range from large companies in the automotive, consumer electronics and consumables sectors; to famous hospitals, research institutes and clinicians.
