Vienna designers Mischer'Traxler created this basket-making machine that stops working when no one is watching. This casting jig by London designer Phil Cuttance is used to spin resin around faceted plastic forms to create unique vases. German designer Annika Frye incorporated a cordless drill in the rotational moulding machine she built for making one-off items using a process that would normally result in an identical series. This desktop 3D printer was adapted by architect Brian Peters to produce ceramic bricks for building architectural structures. Mischer'Traxler also created this machine that uses sunlight to create benches and lamp shades that record the conditions on the day they were produced. German designer Markus Kayser built this 3D-printing machine that uses sunlight and sand to make glass objects in the desert. this project by Antwerp design studio Unfold explores how 3D-printed objects created from identical digital files can be as varied and unique as hand-made objects. Another by Markus Kayser, The Sun Cutter uses a spherical lens to focus a beam of sunlight that’s strong enough to burn through paper, card and thin plywood. Powered by a cordless drill and made of scrap materials, this device by product design students Andrew Duffy, Craig Tyler and Edward Harrison produces hollow, plastic products by rotating a mould on two axis while resins harden inside. Visitors press a button to start this contraption by Mischer'Traxler, which pipes icing onto cakes like a Spirograph toy until the the button is released. A series of production lines were set up inside a former textile factory during this year's Dutch Design Week at an exhibition called C-Fabriek, and this first one named the Paper Poo Machine by Parasite9 was a paper mill that recycled the city’s waste newspapers and leaflets. At the same exhibition, Itay Ohaly’s Creative Factory Line01 made objects like lamps, vases and stools by drilling into a block of polystyrene to make a mould, which was then filled with resin and rotated in a spinning frame as it hardens. Creative Factory Line02 by Thomas Vailly also makes use of rotational moulding, this time creating resin objects inside a stretched and inflated latex mould. Finally at C-Fabriek, Eugenia Morpurgo's production line shaped shoes around the customer’s feet using connectors that replace glue and stitching in the shoe’s construction.
Slideshow feature: following a recent trend for creating one-off products using machines that work like self-contained factories, we've put together a slideshow of all of the best production machines featured on Dezeen.