Yo Shimada Lab, Environmental Design, KCUA

Nosemono Workshop

A Workshop with Shinkogeisha

Date

November 29, 2023

Venue

Kyoto City University of Arts

Lecturer

Shinkogeisha (New Craft House)

Nosemono is a series of tools created by 3D-scanning natural objects such as stones and attaching artificial parts that cling to their surfaces, almost parasitically. For this workshop, we invited Shinkogeisha, a Kyoto-based studio exploring craft through 3D printing, as lecturers.

Each student collected stones in advance and brought them to the workshop, which began with 3D-scanning the stones. Working with the scanned geometry, students designed parts that fit precisely to the contours of each stone, using Boolean operations in Rhinoceros and gravity simulation in Blender. The designed parts were then 3D-printed and glued to the stones, transforming found stones into tools.

The finished works include a vase with a translucent tube coiling around its stone, a sheep wearing a fleece of translucent facets on the back of a stone, a tape dispenser with a stone for its body, and a pencil sharpener with a spherical blade resting on a stone. The singular qualities of each stone—its weight, form, and markings—became sources of inspiration: the function chooses the stone, and the stone attracts the function. The workshop offered an opportunity to consider, at a scale that fits in the hand, a relationship in which the natural and the artificial, accidental form and designed form, lean gently on one another.