RESHAPE18 | sensing materialities
Product design category
Tellus

Designers: Giuliana Marteleto

For centuries, humans produced adornments as the support for a symbolic representation of a historical moment in time. The shape was mostly determined by the materials and the ways of production available in each period of time.
As the time pass, humans were able to explore different materials as well as create pieces of adornment that represent not only the society of the time but a reflection of themselves: their personalities, their mood and the way one wants to present for the society. For a long time, jewellery was created in a manner similar to the first’s goldsmiths. This untold rule, keep it for a long time. Until now.
The alteration of control of the decisions of the whole project from the hands of the designer (and the subjection of the ways of production) and create a meta-design composed of parameters, which comprise changeable values intrinsic to the process, provides a bridge between repetition and transformation, as well as visualization and simulation.

This generating mass, however, resembles the myth of Gaia.
In Greek mythology, Gaia is the divine personification of the Earth. It’s the energy of life itself, represented as the primordial element of a devastating and endless fecundity. The Mother Earth, Tellus Mater, who generates everything in her fertile womb. This strange tune between a meta-design capable of creating diverse alternatives of a given project based on the selection of specific parameters and the myth of the creation of nature served as the starting point to explore forms beyond the ordinary.
TELLUS, therefore, arises from the need to create a collection of jewellery generated by parametric pathways with little or no post-production intervention capable of making an explicit link between the form, system and body.
To create a possible application of the Parametric Design in an industry that still follows the traditional rules, the project needs it a link that could connect the digital and the secular fabrication. For that, we used the lost-wax casting as the way to bring the pieces to life.

The jewellery industry absorbed the 3D printing in its own production process. The fast reproduction as well as the possibility to produce more complex forms guaranty the assimilation of this new technic into the old way of fabricating jewels.
For this entire collection with 5 pieces, from the lost-wax print in the 3d printer to the metal casting using brass and later finishing, the approximate economical investment was around 350€ (all the pieces were printed using a printer focused in jewellery and small detailed objects, later the antique casting technic was applied and then finished with a light polish just to clean any excess of material). This value is 70% less after the piece zero (the original one) is created, giving this project the possibility to bring small series to life.