After music and film it is about time to trade other products in the digital realm. Their shared conceptual-aesthetic approach led Lucas Maassen and Raw Color to research how a physical product can function in a digital environment. How one could acquire it via digital structures. And which opportunities it could offer the consumer. For the project D/struct they collected 60 plastic commodities. Using 3D scanning and printing techniques, they exhaustively detached the object’s design from the material it was made of. 

Resultingly, they came to a new product. Maassen and Raw Color put the intriguing little bags up for offer on www.d-struct.nl. Containing the pulverized matter of the selected product. Goodbye original. The buyer receives a complete 3D-scan of the chosen object along with the package. As such encouraging him to trace the route back to the original. In order to reconstruct another version — or endlessly come up with other versions and variations — of the shattered original using his own 3D-printer.
www.d-struct.nl
www.lucasmaassen.com
The project was part of the exhibtion After the Bit Rush at MU, Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2011.
The digital revolution, the great Bit Rush, is over. The question whether something is analogue or digital does not matter anymore. Everything we do is infl uenced by digital technology. Just as air and water, the property of being digital is only noticed when it is not there, not when it is there.
Participating designers:
Julian Bond, James Bridle, EDHV, Ruth Gurvich, Theo Jansen, Markus Kayser, Tim Knapen, Thomas Lommée, Jorge Lopes dos Santos, Lucas Maassen & Raw Color, Minale Maeda for Droog, Jun Mitani, Yuri Suzuki, The T-Shirt Issue, Troika for Swarovski, and Unfold.
www.mu.nl
111025 - Watering Can
dimensions in mm:
(l) 291 x (w) 92 x (d) 178
weight in grs:
110
function:
Container to carry water from the tap to plants.
111048 - Toy Gun
dimensions in mm:
(l) 468 x (w) 214 x (d) 55
weight in grs:
400
function:
Kids' amusement to simulate a battle.
111011 - Piggybank
dimensions in mm:
(l) 174 x (w) 86 x (d) 120
weight in grs:
65
function:
Container to safe money.
FUTURE

If, for instance, you’d buy ‘Ray Ban sun glasses’, you wouldn’t just get a pair of sunglasses. You’ll get it in pieces, in a bag, which is displayed on the website. These bits are the material remains of the sunglasses, which D/struct scanned. The bag comes with a digital code to download the 3D-scan in high resolution. It also gives access to high-resolution images of the glasses from various perspectives. Providing the information for you to get to work. We’re not even discussing copyright issues anymore. You couldn’t distinguish the real Ray Ban from yours anyway… As goes for the iconic ‘Duplo brick’, the ‘Ikea lamp’, the ‘Swatch watch’…
