Dynamic Wearables for Fashion Design

• Reimagine Manufacturing: 3D printing unlocks traditional design constraints. We will push our designs to the limit to take full advantage of the freedom additive manufacturing offers.
• Design For All, Not One: Parametric tools let us write dynamic scripts that update in real time, enabling a single design system to adapt to each person.
• Think Volumetrically: Forget working with solids and meshes. Voxels offer a highly malleable system for adding, subtracting, merging, thickening, and smoothing shapes, all in one simple and robust system.
• Scan, Don’t Measure: 3D scanning is so accessible now that anyone with a smartphone or camera can capture the geometry of the world. We can use this to capture both big and small, and we’ll use it to scan the body and size different pieces of jewelry.

Scope of the workshop:

This workshop is structured around a series of focused, hands-on computational workflows demonstrated step by step, followed by guided experimentation. Participants will be introduced to multiple parametric strategies for jewelry design in Grasshopper, each highlighting a different approach to form generation, patterning, and customization for body jewelry.

We will begin with 3D scanning using Polycam, introducing students to body-scale data capture and discussing best practices for resolution, cleanup, and accuracy. These scans will serve as a contextual foundation for design, allowing our jewelry to be informed by real anatomy rather than abstract dimensions.

After cleaning up these digital scans in Blender, we can establish digital jewelry workflows using Grasshopper, where the Peacock plugin will serve as our introduction to jewelry tools. Here, we can explore ring sizing, gemstone placement, and prong generation as a foundation for subsequent workflows.

Students will experiment with patterning workflows using Pufferfish to create gradient patterns of curves, as well as twisted box techniques for patterning simple tessellating meshes.

The workshop will then move into more advanced strategies, including recursive systems using Anemone that allow geometry to “grow” across the body, and volumetric design methods where structural “bones” are defined before generating a final skin using Dendro to produce complex, watertight 3D printable surface topology.

The course concludes with a practical overview of resin-slicing workflows in Lychee, focusing on preparing designs for castable resin printing and the lost-wax casting process used to produce precious-metal jewelry.

While demonstrations and discussions are shared collectively, each student will work individually on a final wearable project of their own, resulting in one complete, 3D-printable jewelry piece developed over the course of the weekend.

Program: