Miniature, voronoi-style shelf from lollipop sticks and printed connectors

My test shelf - a Voronoi diagram design, and 3d printed connectors

My Sunday project, above – a tiny set of shelves inspired by Hero-Design‘s Voronoi diagram shelf generator.  I love Voronoi diagrams – not something you hear every day.

Voronoi diagrams are the mathematically perfect form of those shapes that pop up in nature so often (which aren’t fractals -man, I hate fractals.  If it turns out Voronoi diagrams are related to fractals – just don’t tell me).  If you’ve ever looked at the shapes that a mass of touching bubbles makes, or been intregued by the shapes of sightly packed cell walls, then you’ve seen Voronoi diagrams in nature.

This mini-shelf was made with lollipop sticks and 3d printed connectors – I used Hero-Design’s generator to make a Voronoi-diagram outline, and then I imported that into SketchUp and modelled the connectors by hand.  Not the most efficient of processes, I grant you – but my code-fu is too weak at present to generate the connectors procedurally.

As a test, it’s excellent.  As a shelf – its use is limited because of it’s teeny tiny size.

I’m kicking myself for not printing the connectors in a jazzier color or painting the lollipop sticks something a little less ‘I made this out of scrap’ style.  Maybe I’ll try another – but ideally I want to generate a more complex shelf, scale it up to a usable size, print the connectors and go along to my local lumber supplier with a list of very precise lengths and make myself a full size shelf.

I could ultimately print a shelf easier than going to Ikea.  That would be something.