The gang who does the Radar series over at Babelgum came by the BotCave and made this video. They used Nikon d90′s and it turned out beautiful! Go to their site and check it out big.

I.materialise has launched. If you’ve seen 3D printed artistic objects in art galleries, these folks very likely printed them. Arriving on the scene, they appear to be a direct competitor with Shapeways. Materialise does really high end work and they’ve just opened up a business that lets you upload your own designs. Also, they’ve joined thingiverse and have promised to upload and share some of their of their own designs! I love that Thingiverse is the place to share designs, but if you want to get them made and don’t have a printer yet, i.materialise offers another option for turning your designs into beautiful objects. Cool!

MakerBot is going to be in the best art show of the 21st century. It’s called Bits ‘N Pieces and it’ll be at Material Connexion starting on Thursday. I think that this show is the perfect show for citizens of the Thingiverse to check out!

DATES: November 4 – December 4, 2009
HOURS: Monday – Friday, 9am – 6pm
LOCATION: Material ConneXion 60 Madison Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10010 T. 212-842-2050
NEAREST SUBWAYS: #6 at 28th and Park / NRW at 28th and Broadway.

Bits ‘n Pieces is a traveling exhibition of work by international designers, architects, computer scientists, and material and technology researchers. It will showcase projects still in their development stage, as well as furniture, architecture, jewelry, graphic design and products that anticipate the next phase of the digital revolution, focusing on how society is imbued with, shaped by and shapes technology. This new era will be marked by increased awareness about, and accessibility of, continuously advancing technologies and materials and the changes that we will be making in our lives through them will be not just formal but structural, not merely aesthetic but substantive, changing how we actually think about, design and build our objects and space. What will life look like based on changes that are sometimes visible to the public and sometimes invisible?

Read on for the conceptual essay. (It’s good) » Continue reading “MakerBot in the Bits ‘n Pieces show at Material Connexion”

The SingularityU user on Thingiverse has uploaded the 1000th thing to Thingiverse! It’s a spool holder!

Thingiverse started when Zach and I were at NYCResistor and we really needed a place to upload our designs. At the time we had just come up with this idea called “Saturday Spaz” and the goal was to choose something and see if you can make it in one hour on a Saturday. After an hour of infrastructure setup, we knew we were on to something.

Now after we hit this 1000th thing milestone, Thingiverse has come a long way. The tool nebula and the parts nebula have been discovered and put into use and we regularly see folks using Thingiverse as a way to discover wonderful things in the universe!

I recently ran into Dominic and he said, “Hey, I’m the guy who uploaded his skull to Thingiverse!” We promptly printed a smaller version of his skull and spent a good chunk of the afternoon chatting about design, materials, and the state of the world. He’s really into materials and I’m excited to announce that he’s going to be writing the occasional blogpost here on the Thingiverse blog! By way of introduction, I interviewed him!

Bre Pettis: You’re a professor at the UW. What is your favorite thing to teach?
Dominic Muren: Yeah, I teach Industrial Design and Design Studies at the University of Washington. I think the thing that gets me the most fired up is challenging design students to re-examine what their impact can be on society at large. Sure, a well designed car or quarterly report is visually interesting, and serves a functional purpose, like getting you to the store, or telling you if you should buy more or less IBM stock. But when taken as part of a larger system, those same objects alter the way we collectively live our lives, resulting in new social constructs, like the suburb, or the corporation. The things we make make us us.

Bre Pettis: You write and maintain a blog called Humblefacture. What is the mission for Humblefacture?
Dominic Muren: Even though the things we make — and the way we make them — influences our society so profoundly, we have remarkably little discussion about the consequences of our manufacturing technology. In particular, as a society, we tend to assume that we can only maintain our current standard of living by evolving our current manufacturing infrastructure, and that anything else would move us “backward”. This is the argument employed when dissenters bring up the environmental costs, energy shortfalls, social injustices, or economic instabilities of our current manufacturing infrastructure — that change would require us going “back to the stone age”

Humblefacture is founded around the idea that developing different methods of making can lead to a comparable standard of living for a larger proportion of the population, with reduced costs to the environment, society, and individual users. In short, developing new ways of making things will not only make better things, but could have positive side effects as well. We are particularly interested in new making directions which support product modularity and interoperability, small-scale production, and low-investment, low-infrastructure fabrication. I would go so far as to say that making is a form of modern speech, is just as important to protect and enable. Enabling this making-as-speech requires that we build new tools and techniques like makerbot for articulating ideas, but also raise awareness and interest in making in general. Free speech is only useful if people have big enough vocabularies to share interesting ideas.

Bre Pettis: Describe the frontier of Materials today.
Dominic Muren: The world of materials today is a very interesting, very divided place. On the one hand, you have places like Stanford and Tokyo University working on nanomaterials which are some of the most high performance, but also high cost and high embodied energy materials ever made. Call this the Inaccessible Optimum — sure, it’s amazing, but it requires so much infrastructure and expense to make that only the largest, best funded corporations or militaries can ever hope to work with these materials in bulk. On the other hand, there are amazing strides being made in accessible technologies for the developing world — everything from new architectural materials, to cheap ways of making electronics and solar collectors. Call this the Undesirable Mundane — it’s incredible, but only if you’ve never had access to reliable electricity, or durable building materials before. These accessible materials pale in the face of the stuff produced by the developed world’s industrial complex.

I think that there is a major opportunity in materials to explore the intersection of these two frontiers — call it the Mundane Optimum. What can we make by focusing all the advanced understanding of the last 100 years of technological development toward making materials that are super high performance, but also super accessible to average-joe makers? Policy-makers might tell you that the frontier of materials is technological, but I think the true frontier needs this social dimension to reach its full potential. Truly open manufacturing will never be possible without highly useful, highly accessible materials.

Stay tuned for Dominic’s post here on the Thingiverse blog!

I was checking out Oceaneer99‘s photos of models of submarines (seen above) and clicked through to some plans and found Solid Model Memories. There are some amazing plans here that seem to me like they could be turned into great 3D models.

So I clicked around and found this! I love the style of these plans which seem to be a combo of popular science and buck rogers! It seems like the specs are basically all there for someone to make a digital model of this… and then upload it to thingiverse!

Check out Syvwlch awesome youtube tutorial. He took Zach’s bracelet and redid it in sketchup in no time flat! I have to say, I’m impressed with the way that sketchup has improved since I used it 3 years ago!

To print out an object you need an STL file. You can create your own or download one from Thingiverse, or even scan one if you have a 3D scanner (WANT!)

Once you’ve got an STL file, you’ll need to get it to the right size. Watch the video to learn how. To do this you’ll need Blender, the open source 3D creative software. It’s great and it’s free!

I’ll be making more videos like this to walk you through the process of slicing the STL file with Skeinforge and sending the gcode from ReplicatorG to the MakerBot.

4volt Jansen Walker Beta 1 from a3o Studios on Vimeo.

Zach Hoeken and I started Thingiverse 6 months ago because we needed a place to share digital designs. There were other websites that did this, but they all did it wrong. We wanted to get it right with licensing, comments, and that made it easy to share digital designs. We also wanted to support a future where you can download physical object design files and make them real in your living room.

Today 4Volt uploaded a Jansen Walker creature that runs on an arduino. This is basically the coolest thing in the world to me and I’m super exciter excited that it’s shared on Thingiverse.

Today I was in the future about a century ahead for just a second or two and luckily I found internet access. I pulled up Thingiverse.com and it looked very similar to how it looks now, except instead of 500 things, there were’ 500,000,000. I did a quick search for taxidermy (It was the first thing that came to mind. If you know me, you know about my vegan taxidermy collection, pictured above) and there were a lot of search results that really looked amazing. Some were lasercut and some were 3D printed and some were made by something referred to mysteriously as MARD which I looked up and found that stands for “Molecular Arrangement Reconfiguration Device”

Anyhow, when I was jerked back into the present, I checked thingiverse and there are no search results for taxidermy.

As someone who collects faux taxidermy, I am sad. I know the future is filled with all sorts of amazing taxidermy digital designs, but I’m sad that I may have to wait a century to see them.

I want to believe that we can make the future happen now. If you are a digital designer, I challenge you to upload 3D printable designs of animal heads mounted on wood and acrylic lasercut butterflies and whatever other animal designs that appear to be trophies or display pieces, but actually have no animal parts in them. Let’s make the future come just a little bit faster!
photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid