The Past and the Future of Design

Improvement in Sheep Shears
Patent #52,293
January 30, 1866
Inventor: Albert H. Kennedy, Brunswick, OH
“The nature of my invention consists in providing the application of power through spiral spring wires and the combination of machinery, so that sheep can be shorn with great facility and ease.”


A complex tiling form composed on computer and grown in real space using a 3D printer, 2010 @ The Art Center College of Design's "Future of Objects

The Art Center College of Design is taking a look at both the past and future with “The Curious World of Patent Models” and “The Future of Objects.”
The exhibit explores intersections among the domains of art, science, technology and design with side-by-side exhibitions that look at the interplay between the technologies used to fabricate objects and the thought-processes used to conceive them. “The Curious World of Patent Models,” includes more than fifty scale models representing ideas submitted for United States Patent protection circa 1800-1880. “The Future of Objects” displays new digital-age fabrication and prototyping techniques in which startlingly complex forms are conceived and “grown” by machines known as 3D printers. The exhibit shows how technologies related to those used every day in households and offices to print 2D information on flat pieces of paper are now being used to “grow” freestanding 3D objects in physical space using a variety of solid materials.
Art Center College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, 1700 Lida Street in Pasadena, Eagle Rock adjacent. June 4 through August 15.