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Public Art & Civic Engagement
Engaging communities through data-driven storytelling in public spaces, fostering awareness and dialogue on environmental and social issues.
Bringing Industrial Heritage to Light
2022
Ana Herruzo (PI), Diego Canno-Lasso, and Sorob Louie
A Methodology for Illustrating Southern European Utilitarian Design over the Last Three Centuries Through the Digitalization of Assets and the Creation of an Open Public Virtual 3D Library. There are over 4,000 cast iron molds for blowing glass at The Real Fábrica de Cristales (The Royal Glass Factory and Museum), in Segovia, Spain. These molds have been used since 1770 in an artisanal way, to blow utilitarian glass objects, and have been gathered from different parts of Spain and France making this collection a unique historical resource of European lifestyles. There are no drawings or documentation indicating the objects that each mold can produce, therefore this collection is considered a "blind collection." Digitalization of this vast collection has been attempted, but the methods used were too time-consuming for the Factory's limited resources. This paper showcases a real-time technology procedure for digitizing and archiving historic cast-iron molds and the resulting objects that they can produce. The digitization process begins with calibration and extracting geometries of the mold's negative space, continues with cataloging, and finishes with the 3D modeling and imaging uploaded to the cloud. As a result of the engineering efforts for real-time scanning, rendering, and cloud archival, the overall mold archival process is reduced to 5 minutes per mold, making it feasible and a reality to document such an extensive collection. The public access and exposure of this archive will benefit the community by understanding their past and attracting designers, artists, and researchers to use the digital library either for investigation or the creation and design of new glass objects, ultimately contributing to the creation of new heritage.