everyday Painkillers
Computationally Crafted 3D-Printed Memorial Artifacts
Client: National Safety Council
Agency: Energy BBDO
Director: Tucker Walsh
Experience Design: Hyphen-Labs
Fabrication: Shane Roberts, RMI
Creative Technologist: Rodrigo Aguirre
Every 24 minutes, someone in the United States dies from a prescription opioid overdose. Prescribed to Death transformed this tragic rhythm into a public memorial through a striking, data-driven installation: a fully automated machine that continuously carved pills, each engraved with a human face, representing the more than 22,000 people lost in a single year.
Debuting in Chicago as part of the Stop Everyday Killers campaign by the National Safety Council and Energy BBDO, the installation made the opioid epidemic deeply personal. Visitors confronted an emotionally charged landscape of thousands of unique pills—each one a face, each one a life—created in real time as a continuous act of remembrance.
Computational morphing of human faces into carved memorial pills
As part of the experience design team led by Hyphen-Labs, I was responsible for the computational design and automation of the pill modeling process. My role focused on developing a fully parametric and fabrication-ready 3D modeling workflow.
Using Grasshopper, I created a procedural pipeline to generate pill geometries embedded with 3D-scanned human faces. Each face was algorithmically adapted and blended into a standard pill form, ensuring accurate representation while complying with physical and material constraints for CNC milling.
The system included custom algorithms to refit and smooth facial geometry, optimize mesh resolution, and automate the export process for digital fabrication. The result was a robust, scalable workflow capable of producing thousands of unique, high-resolution models.
