Gunning for change: Weapons of design at Show RCA

London – Royal College of Art MA Design Products graduate James Shaw presented his work Making Guns at the RCA graduate show this week. The work comprises a series of three weapon-like tools that facilitate three playful new production processes.

‘The tools are based on the principle of additive manufacturing,’ explains Shaw. ‘The process of building from the base upwards minimises the waste from traditional woodworking in which you cut material away.’

The line-up of tools includes a pewter gun that squirts liquid metal, ‘an accessible way to approach a material that is usually hard to work with’, Shaw tells LS:N Global. The second is a machine gun that sprays papier-mache to create furniture, but could also have applications in building insulation. Finally, a plastic extruding gun pipes playful bright globular forms of HDPE plastic.

The pleasingly crude and primitive aesthetic of the RCA graduate’s work is in line with LS:N Global’s Freakish Forms design direction from Milan 2013.

For more examples of contemporary production processes that go against the grain, see our Anarconomy Decade macrotrend.