[cutting and pasting a Facebook comment]
FB friend:
There seems to have been a dearth of beautiful and innovative tensegrity artwork for decades. Between his new biotensegrity models and these lighting models, Gerald has single handedly advanced tensegrity artwork into the 21st Century. [Facebook link] are photos from the first in-person rehearsal for a dance presentation at the Fascia Research Congress. Gerald shipped all those models in a single piece of checked luggage. I call his design architecture "turnbuckle tensegrity" -- except that all the threads in those struts are right-handed. Turnbuckles would be more elegant, but nobody makes cheap hardware with turnbuckle threading.
Kirby, do you know any good candidates for pitching a feature for Make: Magazine on how to design a geometry, acquire the parts, and assemble "tough tensegrity" models? This would really light the fuse to a massive number of load-bearing tensegrity models in the wild.
Me:
When I joined O'Reilly, Make: Magazine was still sharing the same Sebastopol building (we got the tour) but was morphing into its own standalone business.
The principal there at Maker had purchased a startup named Useractive of Champaign-Urbana (run by Trish and Scott Gray (Making Math), University of Illinois and Wolfram connections) when still a part of O'Reilly management. However by the time the merger happened, and Useractive became O'Reilly School of Technology (which is where I came in, as faculty), he'd opted out of the chain of command.
I therefore interfaced through OST to O'Reilly bosses without ever getting to make solid connections with Make: Magazine and its team. I've gone to Maker Fairs here in Portland, hosted by OMSI (industrial science museum) and friends, and finally got to 3D print an S module and a phi-down version, at a public library, with help from Sam Lanahan's chief CAD designer.
Regarding Tensegrity, I don't know if Maker Mag does write-ups or profiles of individual makers, but if it does, an article on Gerald De Jong, which includes his software contributions (critical to EIG), would most definitely be in order. Let Gerald share his process with readers.
Postscript: O'Reilly wanted to turn OST from a dot com into a dot edu, but that meant getting certified as an academic institution, which process is replete with bureaucracy ($$). The uphill battle to become a legit university in California proved a budget breaker and we dissolved, after a rather fun / wild ride. I met and stay in touch with some astounding people.
