Airborne Snotty Vase: Influenza

Marcel Wanders’s Airborne Snotty Vase is a compelling and humorous example of the creative possibilities enabled by digital fabrication methods, such as high-tech scanning and printing techniques. Here Wanders endeavored to create beauty out of the grotesque by giving visual form to the shape of a human sneeze. Made from an enlarged three-dimensional digital recording of the microscopic mucus particles emitted during a sneeze, this vase was constructed from layers of polyamide powder fused together by heat from a laser beam using rapid prototyping technology. Holes to hold flowers were added to the design during the digital editing stage to transform this biological process into a functional vase.