.MGX Design products

Ever since the start-up of the department, Materialise.MGX has been looking for innovating ideas to work on, preferably ideas or forms that seemed almost impossible to produce. This search has lead to our existing collection of designer products, but it was also the start of some interesting collaborations with designers like for instance Patrick Jouin and Arik Levy, which resulted in an astonishing collection of furniture and even art objects. With these projects and collaborations, Materialise.MGX wishes to promote design, but also tries to emphasise the endless possibilities of the techniques and the futuristic - but not far-fetched - ideas behind it all.

MASS CUSTOMISATION BY .MGX

At the core of the .MGX collections are designers selected from around the world who work towards creating solid and flexible structures out of liquid or powder. Customise your interior goods Collection launched by .MGX in 2006 reinforces the idea that individuals are willing and able to make their own decisions. They are more and more interested to participate in the design process and to deal with a certain degree of exclusivity and inimitable authenticity. The design secret recipe generated by the Magics production software finds its nearly perfect translation into the .MGX file and final product. This unique expertise leads to a made-to-measure assistance and service when preparing the STL-file or modifying an existing design by rescaling, re-modelling, adding a logo.

Moreover, a range of materials (polyamide or nylon, photosensitive epoxy, Alumide, polycarbonates, ABS...), coatings and colours are available once 3D scans of objects or other types of files are put into production.
This experimental customisation finds its roots with the UK-based architect and designer Ron Arad who has been the first to explore with Materialise the potential of rapid manufacturing techniques applied to his specific design projects such as the Bouncing Vase in 2000 and the “Not made by hand, Not made in China” bracelet, using SLS. Fascinated by this process, Arad set up afterwards the Rapid Form Unity at the Royal College of Arts in order to achieve more concrete results with its postgraduate students. Within the Customise Collection, we find Arik Levy (Ldesign), creating lampshades, necklaces, fruit bowls. Among the recent .MGX collections, he designed the Shaman jewellery collection as well as the Mini- and Handshake lampshades, the last one being with the Piflow limited edition table lamp commissioned by the Centre G. Pompidou in Paris, France. Donated to the museum, the Handshake was produced in a special edition size of 58 cm high. Another example of customised interior goods is the PaleA 3D-printed lamp of Dan Yeffet (JellyLab), inspired by the fossil age of the Palaeolithic, which is part of the FNAC (Fond National d’Art Contemporain) in France, along with the Solid C2 chair and Solid S1 stool designed by Patrick Jouin. Some exciting projects have been individually conducted, for instance with Philip Treacy who designed bedside table lampshades for the G Hotel in Galway (Ir) or with Future Systems whose Fruitbowl was acquired by the MoMA in New York. At the occasion of the Brilliant exhibition on contemporary lighting design, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London asked Ron Arad to visualise his futuristic ideas through an installation partly built on a Materialise .MGX stereolithography machine.