Cassius

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Cassius represents the direction in which we can steer our future. Cassius demonstrates that anyone can realize their ideas as physical objects. At present we have two hurdles. The first hurdle is that generative production machines do not yet enable us to produce anything we wish. The second hurdle is the difficulty of communicating an idea to a machine without first undergoing years of training. This second hurdle is addressed by Cassius.

Before the industrial revolution we could go to a tradesman, a cabinet maker for example, and communicate our idea for a new table. These ideas would then be realized within boarders of our financial means and the skills of the tradesman. Upon the arrival of industrialized production we lost this freedom, to a large extent, in favor of prices that a larger portion of our population could afford.

In 1978 in “The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy” we heard with pleasure and hope of a machine that could create something that is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”. The machine, called a Replicator termed originally in “Star Trek” could, at a push of a button, could synthesize food. This could be seen as the second generation of such machines. The third generation was presented in “The Star of the Unborn”. It was not a machine but a human, known as “The Worker”, who could turn ideas into reality.

Unless we really like bad tee the first generation was not much use to us. The second generation required special skills to program it and represents a similar situation to that in which we find ourselves now. The third generation is where Fluid Forms is working towards. In the Fluid Forms vision, the job of “The Worker” is performed by a combination of “Design Interfaces” and generative production machines.

As does the tradesman, the Design Interfaces maintains the borders represented by the capabilities of the production machines and gives us feedback relating to price. As “The Worker” interprets our ideas, so too does the Design Interface: through its ease-of-use, it communicates our ideas to the production machines.