Admiring Big Horn Sheep in the F13LD - Matthew Shomper

Biomimicry, Computational Design, And The Future Of Impact Protection

Matt Shomper returns to CDFAM with a free toolkit, a bighorn sheep nemesis, and a real-time view of geometry that batch tools tend to hide.

Matt Shomper was part of the very first CDFAM in NYC, with one of the more technically deep and openly philosophical talks we have run, somehow threading Mantis Shrimp, trail branches read as wayfinding, and spinal implants into a single argument about geometry.

Before that he was in our nTop “After Dark” showcase, where geometry experts demoed their experiments, everything from over-engineered skateboard trucks to visual ASMR. What that night hinted at, and what Matt has been chasing since, is the intuition you build about math, geometry, and engineering performance when the feedback is real time.

In DC this July he returns to that idea, this time with a nemesis: the Bighorn Sheep, and the horn it evolved to repeatedly headbutt an opponent at full force without (apparently) scrambling its own brain. The horn survives because of how it is formed, not what it is made of, and Matt’s work is an attempt to design that deliberately rather than just bewilderingly admire it.

To do that he built F13LD, a suite of browser based tools, free to use, for synthesizing and evaluating metamaterial geometry and its performance. The tools homogenize as you edit, so you watch the directional stiffness surface change shape instead of comparing the endpoints of a batch of FEA runs. As Matt puts it:

“The interesting behavior lives in the transitions, and you only find it by watching the structure move.”

That real-time view doubles as a teaching tool, and Matt is deliberate about keeping it open:

“I’d rather hand someone a thing they can take apart than a black box.”

As a primer to his DC presentation I asked him six questions, covering where architected materials actually pay for themselves, how data moves from a CT scan to a machine ready 3MF file, and what real-time homogenization reveals that batch analysis hides.

Read the full interview here: https://cdfam.com/shomper-26/

The questions in there may not be the ones you have for Matt.

If not, join us in DC, July 15-16, and ask him in person.

Register to attend CDFAM DC: https://cdfam.com/cd-dc-26/#register