A three-way collaboration has cracked four problems that plague 3D printing: Speed, size, material strength and perhaps most importantly, the need to design for gravity. With a conventional 3D printer, one cannot print cantilevers without support structures. This adds time to the process and adds the step of needing to remove the support structure afterwards. But the new Rapid Liquid Printing machine, developed by MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, Steelcase and Swiss product designer Christophe Guberan, isn't beholden to any of these issues.

That's because the machine doesn't print on a bed in layers, but instead squirts its material into a pool of gel. With the material thus suspended by the gel, the vertically-oriented nozzle can move around in all three axes without needing to layer.

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The material itself, which can be rubber, foam or plastic, is a two-part mixture—think epoxy—that is soft enough to be squirted out of the nozzle, but begins curing and hardening immediately. And intriguingly, one can vary the "line weight" of what's being printed, going from thin to thick within the same stroke. Take a look:

"As a designer, what's most fascinating and unique about Rapid Liquid Printing is the line quality of the print," says Yuka Hiyoshi, a senior industrial designer for Steelcase brand Turnstone. "It's soft, almost organic. It evokes images of brushstrokes or the branches of plants.

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"The printing speed is very impressive. In the far future, large scale objects could be printed in minutes instead of days. Also, it's not limited to typical 3D printing material making the technology very desirable from a design perspective."