Riding a 3D Printed Wave SoCal Style

Tas Oszkay, Mo Harmon, and Jac Currie are graduate students at UCLA's school of Architecture and Urban Design who re-imagined skateboard product design using 3D Printing to manufacture an incredible board in one unit. Their board is an involved aesthetic dialogue between form and function. The design reveals heavy influences from the team's organic inspiration, Radiolaria. From a machining perspective, the complex mineral shell of radiolarians is nothing short of a nightmare.

The patterns of the organism from under a microscope weave into each other, looking roughly similar to a dried up piece of sea reef. The team took the basic design of the silica skeletons unique to radiolarians and further complicated it through layering using CAD software.

3D design software gives the team control over the design—density, shape, movement of the structure—and 3D Printing gives the team the ability to incorporate all required and desired features into the board which is then manufactured simultaneously on a build platform.

Their board is self identified as a cruiser, meant for gracing the beach front or getting about campus. They think in the future they might look into trick boards; 3D Printing is a technology capable of being extremely light, and that would factor well into such a venture. But for now, they're experimenting with the more relaxed board.