You can take pretty much any kid to an arcade, drop a few quarters into whatever Resident Evil knockoff you find there, put the fluorescent blue Uzi in their tiny little hands, and they'll know what to do. It's a sad truth, but it's the truth nonetheless. Give that kid one of James Shaw's homemade weapons, though, and instead of dead zombies and night terrors, you might wind up with an end table.
Shaw hacked together the trio of decidedly non-lethal firearms for his final project at the Royal College of Art, in London. One specializes in plastic, blasting out clumped spaghetti strands like the Play-Doh factory toys of yore. The resulting multicolor towers look a little bit like a mountain of soft serve trying to transform into a monster from a Guillermo Del Toro movie. Feed it a glass tabletop, and it's ready for the living room. Shaw's paper mache rifle is a two-handed affair, giving any object in its path a thick, bumpy coat of pulp. Rounding out the collection is a pewter-drizzling, submachine gun-style contraption, perfect if you've ever wanted to play as a "drip castle" in Monopoly.
The unusual tools were born out of the designer's interest in new means of making, specifically ones involving additive techniques, like those used in 3D printing, as opposed to traditional subtractive methods. Imagine Michelangelo in 1504, putting the final touches on his masterpiece David after having spent two years chiseling it down from a solid 10-ton block of marble. The process Shaw's exploring here is pretty much the opposite. But the form the tools take isn't as strange as it might seem. We have nail guns, spray guns, and handheld drills, Shaw points out, something he attributes to "our desire to dominate and master materials and our environment."
The resulting multicolor towers look a little bit like a mountain of soft serve.Shaw's guns, however, go against that idea of mastery. The designer envisions a more "organic" future for the built environment, one that will require new types of tools. "Objects are always informed by what made them," he says. "From wooden tables to laptop cases, the form of objects is totally dictated by the machines and processes that created them."
And while multicolor fro-yo furniture may never take off, there is reason to be excited about technologies that give us new ways to create with real, physical stuff. For proof, look no further than the 3Doodler, the handheld 3D-printing pen that recently showed up on Kickstarter. What will it be useful for? Who knows, but it was compelling enough to raise about a billion dollars in crowdsourced funding.
That element of unknown potential, Shaw says, is much of the fun of projects like his homemade guns. "The exciting thing about making new types of tools is that they will necessarily allow new forms and types of objects."
