Royal College of Art graduate Morten Grønning Nielse has designed ‘Happaratus,’ a glove with vibrating abrasive pads on the tip of each finger to enable people to shape hard materials like wood, stone and concrete with their hands.
Morten created what he describes as his “haptic power-tool” in collaboration with craftsmen such as sculptors, designers, model makers, and furniture restorers.
“The project takes an experimental approach to augment the human hand as a crafting tool, by increasing its power and capabilities,” said the designer. “So far, the journey has featured a series of conceptual experiments and mechanical explorations that helped uncover the potential for disrupting contemporary tools and work flows.”
Two abrasive pads at each fingertip oscillate in a specific motion that provides high efficiency and control.
3D printing is a popular choice among contemporary designers for prototyping, but critics like Richard Sennet have raised fears that “when the head and hand are separate, it is the head that suffers.” In his 2008 book, The Craftsman, he quotes the physicist Victor Weisskopf telling a group of MIT students who had worked exclusively with computerised experiments, “When you show me the result, the computer understands the answer, but I don’t think you understand the answer.” Happaratus enables designers to shape the material with their fingers, thus maintaining the link between head and hand.
“Doing this directly with my fingertips, without distancing myself from the material, enables me to work much more intuitively with complex geometries and create ‘hand crafted’ prototypes really quickly,” said Morten. “I developed the tool because as a designer, I’m very interested in exploring geometries and the relationship between a form and the material it is made from.”
But it seems the potential for this project reaches beyond the designer’s original intentions. “I now see the invention as a disruptive tool that enables artisans to interact with materials in a new and unique way.” Sculptor David Neat has used the Happaratus to create Grinlings, a finished collection of balsa wood objects. “These objects demonstrate the opportunities in shape development and the soft form-language, which is characteristic of shapes generated with this augmentation of the human hand,” said Morten.
Beyond that he has had interest from the cleaning industry and even from surgeons who see application for the tool in bone and dental surgery. “Needless to say, there are some very exciting future applications of Happaratus that needs to be explored.” said Morten.
Happaratus will be on show as part of Dubai Design Week’s Global Grad Show alongside work from universities including Switzerland’s Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL), Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, the United States’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Hong Kong Polytechnic.
Further reading for the especially geeky:
- interview :: made by michael
- interview :: nordvink
- interview :: james molkenthin
- interview :: richard hardy
