Additive Technologies and Their Applications in Furniture Design and Manufacturing

This paper deals with an overview of additive manufacturing and its segment - 3D printing, which is today rapidly and widely used (Agashe et al., 2020) for personal and high-capacity production. The paper discusses the possible positive factors such as small and personalized production series, cheaper design and production process, complex geometry, bionic structures (whose surfaces are complicated to make, and are copy of biological organisms) and negative factors such as lack of educated specialists and trainings. Those facts are affecting the implementation of these technologies in different segments of the design, product development and furniture production. The impacts of new technologies on the design and production of rapid prototypes and finished products in furniture industry are analyzed. The positive results of using additive manufacturing indicate that, in spite of minor obstacles and problems with connecting different production processes, additive production will have a significant place in the future of furniture design and production. The most important advantages of 3D printing is fast prototyping, one piece production, free form designing and the use of bio-based materials and their possibility of recycling.