PARAMETRIC MODELING FOR ADDITIVE CLAY MANUFACTURING AS A VECTOR FOR SUSTAINABILITY/CIRCULARITY IN DESIGN EDUCATION

The paper presents the experience gained through the course Parametric Modeling for Additive Clay Manufacturing, recognized as a moment of extracurricular credit provision by the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano and organized within the internal Fab Lab. This course fostered additive fluid-dense printing, particularly of ceramic materials, by taking up the basic concepts of Fused Deposition Modeling additive printing and then relating them to those of Liquid Deposition Modeling printing, noting how there are significant variations between the two printing systems, which go to influence the design and construction rules of 3D models created for this technology. The two-day activity also emphasized the advantages of using parametric modeling systems, introducing the Grasshopper environment to achieve results also challenging to obtain through traditional Computer Aided Design, and optimizing exportable machine paths for Liquid Deposition Modeling printing. During the course, vast space was given to design activities to conceive and realize collections of additive-printed objects in ceramic materials, where all the material used for imperfect/wrong outputs was entirely recovered and reused in the same production cycle. This process proved to be a valuable and attractive training moment, and in order to provide all the information about the activity, an introduction chapter helps clarify the context and the field of application the crash course is framed, and the lessons learned are listed in the discussion and conclusion part of the paper.