Clay-Dough: Shape Changing Ceramics
Clay is a material that naturally shrinks, with each type of clay shrinking at different rates as it undergoes chemical changes in the firing process, where the clay transforms into ceramic. We explore how to tune the shrinkage of clay and employ shrinkage as a method for creating ceramic forms through the development of a new material called clay-dough.
Years:
2022-current
Collaborators:
Fiona Bell, Erin McClure, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, Ruby Ta, and Leah Buechley
Publications:
Fiona Bell, Erin McClure, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, Ruby Ta, and Leah Buechley. 2024. Shape-Changing Clay-Dough: Taking a Material-Oriented Approach to 3D Printing. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642246
Fiona Bell, Erin McClure, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, Ruby Ta, and Leah Buechley. 2024. Designing 3D Printed Ceramics from a Clay with Tunable Shrinkage. Design Research Society 2024: Boston (DRS ’24). https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.250
Clay-Dough Materials
Clay-dough materials are made from varying ratios of white stoneware clay and corn-flour-based dough. During the kiln firing process, the dough burns away completely causing the clay to shrink more than it would normally. The amount of dough within the clay-dough material correlates to the amount of shrinkage that will occur.
Material-Oriented Design Approach
This work introduces a material-oriented approach for designing and fabricating ceramic forms through clay-dough’s shrinkage. The process begins with sketching a silhouette of a vessel’s form and mapping it to a material loading pattern. The print tube is loaded in accordance with the designed pattern and a simple cylinder is printed. As the cylinder goes through the drying and firing process, it morphs into the intended form.
Morphing Vessels
We leverage clay-dough’s tunable shrinkages to develop a variety of morphing vessels each with a unique size and form. The following vessels are all to scale, showcasing the printed cylinder and the final fired vessel.
