Moving away from designing for 3D printing that emulates traditional uses of conventional materials, a London-based design group called Softkill Design is experimenting with structures using plant-based "bio-plastic" fibers that are laid down by a 3D printing process called laser "sintering," which fuses together particles by the pinpoint application of heat, rather than chemical bonding agents.
Softkill's project is ProtoHouse, which is intended to test the boundaries of large-scale 3D printing by designing with computer algorithms that micro-organize the printed material around the stresses implied by the design constraints. With the support of Materialise, a Belgian additive manufacturing company that prototypes medical devices, Softkill first produced a high-resolution prototype of a 3D printed house at a 1:33 scale.