Beating Heart

In the near future, what will be the relationship between human beings and machines?

As the combination of human body and advanced machines brings huge benefits, such as better health condition, to us, what should be the definition of human, or pure human become? Or, on the other hand, is it still significant to tell so distinctly between the two?

3D Printing Machines(Normal Ones and Phrozen Sonic Mini)

3D Printing Material(Normal Materials and UV Sensitive Resin)

ElEGOO Mercury plus Washing & Curing Machine for LCD/DLP/SLA Printed Models(wash and reinforce)

Servo Motor

Clay

We were inspired by this advanced, servo based animatronic heart mechanism, which perfectly imitates the beating pattern of a real human heart.

We were wondering the relationship between human beings and developed machines when conceiving our concepts. We consider heart as a significant organ, since it assume the ability to keep the operation for each physical body. If we remove a human heart and replace it with a machine heart, could we still define him or her as a normal human being? If we stretch out even further, the combination of machine and human beings must become a tendency as technology is flourishing nowadays. With the intention to increase people's living conditions, the association will be built tighter. As a result, how to define a human being?

We intend to build this piece based on somebody who just received a heart transplant surgery with a machine heart.

Though we directly take the finished inside servo thing and mainly focus on the design of the heart shells and the outer skeletons, we still use clay to try to clarify the structure.

These images inspired us with the aesthetic design.

The texture of the first picture reminded me of the pattern on the wing of butterflies. Also, in many cultures, the image of butterfly represent the concept of rebirth and reborn, which highly fits with the situation of a heart transplant patient.

The skeleton image indicates the structure of the rib cage, while the last image provides much inspiration on how organic elements can combine with arts.

For the hear shell part, we made the design for the left and right front parts. The butterfly-shaped piece stretches out, which would later imitate the shaking of wings when the machine heart starts beating.

For the design of the skeleton, it's mainly about the ribs and the spines. We use subD for the construction of the spine unit and the first one rib. Then we duplicate the rib piece and alter them into ones with different angels and length.

Then we adjust some features of the heart shell in Meshmixer so that it could be directly attached to the inner machine.

We use the "Sculpt" tool to make the connection part more smooth.

This new 3D Printing Machine, Phrozen Sonic Mini, is capable of printing more accurate and detailed models with a smaller size, considering the limited space of the printing stage.

We need to attach and adjust support to the model and keep the whole shape inside of the stage.

The principle of the UV sensitive resin, which is the material the printer use, is similar to the filling material dentists use, which desires UV light to make it strong and solid.

This is the normal 3D printing part, for ribs and spine units. We use the transparent printing material to make it look better.

As I have mentioned above, the freshly printed UV-resin model is still a little bit soft. As a result, we first carefully remove the support part from the shell. Then, we put the whole model into disinfectant to wash away redundant resin. Finally, we set the UV light to make the model stronger.

As you could see from the picture, after the UV light, The model turned from completely transparent into a little bit turbid.

Finally, we attached the pieces to the machine hear and use glue gun to combine the skeleton.

It's worth mentioning that we imitate the specific human spine radians to make it more real. As you could see from the side view, in the middle part, the spine leans forward slightly.

After our class met and exchanged ideas with each other, we found out two main problems and made improvements upon them. On the one hand, we didn't build any connections between the heart and the spine model, which makes the two looks separate and weird. On the other hand, we didn't do the postprocessing part originally, while later we do selected and sprayed lacquer to make the wings look more vivid and nicer.

This is a really tricky and complicated topic when discussing upon the relationship between we human being and machines, especially when the connecting part is that strong.

Consequently, we slightly changed some part of the code to make it more interactive with the audience. As you could see from the video, when people being detected around it becomes more and closer, its beating speed increases. During the process, we aim to show that the connection between human beings counts much more than telling whether it's an biological heart or a machine heart.