"We wanted to bring the family portrait into the next century"

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in latest video from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura of Japanese creative agency PARTY talks about the pop-up 3D photo booth he ran in Tokyo last year. 

The Omote 3D Shashinkan project, which we featured on Dezeen last year, gave customers the opportunity to buy a 3D-printed model of themselves or their family. "We wanted to find a new way to innovate the form of the family portrait and bring it to the next century," Kawamura explains. "What happens is, when you come, we take a full 3D scan [of your body] using our portable scanners. People could actually bring back home their miniature figurines, instead of a 2D portrait that you normally get."

PARTY used a colour 3D printer to produce the detailed models, which ranged from 10cm to 20cm high, but Kawamura believes there is still a lot of room for the technology to improve. "3D printing for me is a very exciting medium to play around with, but I think it's still in a very early phase of development," he says. "After doing this project we've learnt a lot of technical difficulties and a lot of things that could be done better in terms of technologies and also the materials that we use."

But Kawamura is optimistic about the future possibilities of 3D printing. "Everything, I think, will get better in the next year or two; there'll be significant improvements," he says. "Just the idea that anyone could manufacture their own product is very, very interesting."

This movie features a MINI Cooper S Countryman.

The music featured is by South African artist Floyd Lavine, who performed as part of the Design Indaba Music Circuit. You can listen to Lavine's music on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our Dezeen and Mini World Tour reports from Cape Town.