Molten Phonics.

Molten Phonics is a conceptual online service that allows customers to use audio and a handful of other variables to customize personalized glassware, taking advantage of a combination of digital manufacturing and artisanal glassblowing to bring your pieces to life. Immortalizing a favorite song or loved one’s voice. The project also served as a fun attempt to involve glass as the material in a digital form of production. Unfortunately, I could not find a glass blower to test this concept in the real world.

For this project, the class was asked to exploit the benefits of digital manufacture in the context of customization. We were asked to do this by designing a product that could be customized and purchased by a user through a website and use digital manufacture to create the product from the data provided through the user’s website interaction. 

* All of the glassware concepts shown are produced from the audio played alongside each glass *

Ideation.

When deciding on what form of digital manufacture I would use, I came across Neri Oxman’s work at MIT in glass 3D printing which functioned in a similar way to FDM printing, laying thick layers of molten glass to create beautiful low-fidelity layered glass sculptures. I found this project fascinating as glass is a notoriously difficult material to work with and I had never heard of it used in digital manufacture before, this inspired me to use choose glass as the material of my project. With the scale of the machine and cost of usage, I decided on a different route, to use 3D routing to carve out negative space into split molds that glass could be blown into, expanding into its customized form. 

I wanted sound to be the main input the customer offers to influence the form of the customizable product. Audio can be a very powerful force whether it be the music we love, attached to significant moments in our lives, or the voices of the people we love. The product I landed on is glassware associated with alcoholic beverages, this choice was made due to alcohol being closely tied to socializing and celebration. Whether it be celebrating by popping champagne, catching up with friends over a beer or a cocktail, remembering someone you have lost at an Irish style wake, birthday shots, or sharing some drinks before you head out to your favorite music act.  

Wood was chosen for the mold material as it is a low-cost, routable material suitable for one-off production. These one-off molds will also be scorched in the production and can be used as packaging when shipped to the customer. This will give them an intimate look into the production of their customized product and the forces involved.