Sponsors

Recommended
  • 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator SE (Standard Edition) 3D Navigation Device USB ( 3DX-700028 )
    3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator SE (Standard Edition) 3D Navigation Device USB ( 3DX-700028 )
    3D Connexion
  • The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto
    The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto
    by Kevin A. Carson
  • Mastering Blender
    Mastering Blender
    by Tony Mullen
  • Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6
    Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, Global Wireless, Latest Generation)
    Amazon.com
  • Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines
    Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines
    by Allan Brito
  • Makers
    Makers
    by Cory Doctorow
  • 3Dconnexion SpacePilot PRO - 3D motion controller - 31 button(s) - wired - USB
    3Dconnexion SpacePilot PRO - 3D motion controller - 31 button(s) - wired - USB
    3D Connexion
  • Making it Big in Software: Get the Job. Work the Org. Become Great.
    Making it Big in Software: Get the Job. Work the Org. Become Great.
    by Sam Lightstone

Entries in design (79)

Thursday
Aug192010

A Trophy for Materialise

  • Share
Materialise was selected to produce trophies for the Moto GP in Sachsenring and Formula 1 race in Budapest. The design was made by Antonio Pio Saracino at the request of Eni, who needed a new interpretation of their traditional six-legged dog logo. Saracino's ethereal design is quite amazing, and of course, impossible to build using normal manufacturing techniques.
 

Follow us on Twitter - Subscribe to our Feed

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Thursday
Jul292010

Add a Floor for only $129

  • Share
There are tens of thousands of new web-based services that do practically everything, from counting kids' allowances to photo editing to managing your sales process. One of them is FloorPlanner, "the easiest way to create floor plans". They provide a simple web interface with drag and drop capability for true ease of use. 
 
The service offers two types of personal accounts, in addition to several professional account types: Free (but ad-supported), which provides the ability to create "one house" and a "Plus" account that permits up to "5 houses" without any distracting ads. Plus costs a very low €19 per year. 
 
The development we noticed was a special option to actually print the floor you've designed - for only USD$129. FloorPlanner has teamed with industry giant Materialise to produce the printed floors, apparently "within 10 days" each.
 
FloorPlanner suggests these models would be excellent for builders and architects to show to prospective clients as well as "a great gift for new home-owners". We totally agree. 
 

 

Follow us on Twitter - Subscribe to our Feed

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Saturday
May152010

3D Printing Solves The Innovator's Dilemma?

  • Share
In the classic business book, "The Innovator's Dilemma", author Clayton M. Christensen describes a scenario which happens all to often in large companies:
 
  • Inventive staff come up with a new way to produce the product
  • Management is not interested in backing the new way because even if it succeeded, the amount of revenue is a pittance compared to the existing revenues
  • The new idea is shelved
  • The inventive staff leave and do it themselves in a smaller startup company
  • The smaller company can double, triple or more in size easily because it's so small
  • The new approach, while initially useful only for a small niche of business, is gradually improved over a long period of time
  • Eventually, the new technology surpasses the old technology and the original company falls
 
A long tale, but quite typical. Christensen shows how this exact sequence occurred as hydraulic diggers overcame steam shovels in the mid-20th century, and later how this pattern of disruptive technology repeated with generations of hard disk storage. 
 
We're thinking about 3D printing as a manufacturing technique. Today it's useful only in particular niches. But it's gradually getting more capable, as we have a world full of inventive folks trying every possibility, keeping those that work, and eliminating those that fail. 
 
Perhaps we're seeing The Innovator's Dilemma in action right now. If we stretch our imagination to the far future, could 3D printing approaches overcome traditional manufacturing? Could our factories of the future be extremely advanced versions of the kits and printers we use today? 
 

Follow us on Twitter - Subscribe to our Feed

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Monday
Mar222010

uPrinting Arms

Tiberius Arms is a small company specializing in the design and manufacturing of advanced pneumatic weapons. You may have used similar weapons on the paintball grounds, but they're also used by the military for training and police forces as a "less than lethal" weapon. Tiberius has been producing weapons since their first product, a sniper rifle, was released in 2005. 
 
But Tiberius had a problem with their workflow: being a small company, they had to outsource various functions. Their design process had designs created in Utah, metal prototypes were prepared in Indiana. This meant significant delays as items were shipped between these locations during the development stage. As all imaginative people know, the least possible cycle time is most desirable to maintain a creative flow. Not only was the process terribly slow, it had other issues, according to Dennis Tiberius:
 
On top of time wasted, numerous mistakes resulted because there was no way to efficiently and cost-effectively develop multiple prototypes for the testing of the models. Unseen design errors occurred, which became a serious product development issue. Models did not always match our drawings and development time was extended significantly.
 
To speed things up Tiberius decided to acquire their own Dimension uPrint 3D printer. This device is a true commercial 3D printer, but is one of the least expensive. The new printer permitted very rapid turnaround between idea and prototypes you hold in your hand. These physical models enabled a very quick verification of fit, meaning committing to the expensive metal model became a much more confident affair. 
 
Via Tiberius Arms (Hat tip to Jessica)
Monday
Mar012010

The New Means of Production

We've been reading a very interesting article by Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign, which discusses the implications of advanced personal manufacturing capabilities on art and design.

Smith explains the basics for those who aren't familiar with modern fabbing, but then goes to review thoughts by several designers, writers and analysts. A key concept we picked up was the notion that design is a relationship between "representation" and "assemblage". In other words, can the design actually be built? Can a vision become reality? In the past the trump card was always held by the assemblage half of the equation. But with today's tools - and we don't just mean the manufacturing devices, we also mean the very advanced software that powers our 3D models - the scales are tipping towards the designer.

As each day passes, equipment is more capable and less expensive, while software becomes more powerful (and sometimes less expensive) and repositories of 3D models and associated assembly paradigms grow vast.

Smith lists several recent exhibitions that attempted to go deep on the fluctuating relationship between representation and assemblage. We're all exploring the new relationship to determine more precisely where it lies. But in the end we expect the line between model and object will get much, much closer. So close that in some situations it won't even matter.

Via Serial Consign

Saturday
Jan022010

Making an Artist's Living by 3D Printing

There's a wonderful article by 3D printing artist Bathsheba Grossman over at Say Something, where she describes her journey from student to world-renowned 3D artist. And the best part: She's now making a living from selling 3D printed art.

 

But it isn't easy. She spent ten years after completing school to build up the skills in various disciplines (art, mathematics, CAD, etc.) and the experience to build up an art business that today serves as her main source of revenue. We've written of her work several times in the past. Her strategy is direct marketing: 

 

I haven't made much inroad into the traditional art world, but then showing in galleries is not a focus for me. I made a conscious decision about ten years ago to work directly for the viewer – you – rather than try to get the attention of cultural gatekeepers.

 

What has been the result of her efforts? More than just a job, apparently:

 

My work has appeared in the New York Times, the London Times and Der Spiegel, as well as Wired, Discover and Make magazines. One of my lamps was in TIME Magazine's 100 most influential designs of 2007. My sculptures have appeared in two hit TV shows, Second Life, and a Japanese videogame commercial. John Conway and Douglas Hofstadter used pictures of them in recent books. They've been shown in Italy, Spain, Korea, New York and Cleveland. An irony-free Wikipedia entry for me was started in 2004. And this site moved over a quarter million dollars of art in 2007, which isn't bad considering I wrote the whole thing by hand, with web skills dating from about 1996.

 

You can see more of Bathsheba's amazing work at her website.

 

Via Say Something

Monday
Dec282009

Nervous Jewelry

 

Actually it's not the jewelry that's nervous, it's the creators. Or their company: Nervous System. They produce a line of jewelry (bracelets, rings, necklaces, earrings and brooches) that were generated by sophisticated algorithms in software. The designs are then either 3D printed, or in some cases 3D printed moulds are used to create the final objects.

 

Nervous System uses three different algorithms for much of their product lines: diffusion limited aggregation (which produces eerie coral-ish branching structures); Distortion meshes using a physics simulator (which produces weird twisty meshes that look strangely natural) and Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (which produce similar stretchy meshes, but they're a lot smoother).

Here's the best part: you can actually play with these algorithms yourself using three handy applets on their Tools page.

 

We're very pleased to see a few things going on here:

 

  • 3D Printing technology is being used to create highly unique objects for a new business that might not have existed otherwise
  • Advanced mathematical algorithms that emulate natural designs join 3D printing technology to produce something fantastic


Will small designers who employ these advanced techniques demonstrate the future of 21st century businesses? Will this approach grow and overtake conventional techniques? We're watching closely.

 

Via Nervous System (Hat tip to Jessica)

Tuesday
Dec222009

Bios in San Jose!



The ZER01 Art and Technology Network is preparing for what promises to be a spectacular event in September 2010 in San Jose, California. The event is an art exhibition held every two years, and this year's theme is "Build Your Own World". Now that's the a theme Fabbaloo readers would like to hear more about.

One of the exhibitors will be the BIOS Collective: "BIOS collective is a working group of academic and professional designers exploring the application of biological patterns to architecture."

We've written about their interesting work before.

According to Charles Lee, Co-Founder & President of the Bios Design Collective:

We are hoping for a close relationship with the 3d community to try to help realize our project. The installation is entitled Coloniatechne and it is our hope that when complete it would be the largest collection of 3d printed panels yet assembled. We have budgeted for the purchase of at least three Reprap machines and hope to have them continuously run in a musuem or gallery setting for most of the next year for the final installation in September. Since we have only won the concept design phase of the project the specifics of the where has not been resolved yet. We want to make the production of the panels open to the whole 3d community in the hopes we can achieve the production of all the "Polyps" we need.


The ColoniaTechne project is uses the principles of agent-based self organization to form the structures. While these principles are found in many places within not only nature but also human society, Bios have chosen Coral as the inspiration of the ColoniaTechne project.

Our project proposes an interpretation of the qualities shared between complex biological systems – like coral – and the collaborative distributed networks found in 21st century human electronic culture. To create our project, we will draw from two open-source communities: one centered around the development of the “Replicating Rapid Prototyper” (RepRap) and one centered around the development of software for an open-source microcontroller (Arduino). With the help of these two communities, and SJ Zero-One, we will create a self-organized, interactive sculpture who’s behavior runs on crowd-sourced algorithms.



Bios plans to build a "Pavilion" at a point of high traffic and waiting area for convention commuters, where they will be astonished by the displays. Inside the pavilion unique "polyps" will use genetic algorithm-equipped "Grasshopper" software to develop the objects. However:

Grasshopper, and its companion program Rhino, are both down-loadable as fully functional trial versions, and so are available to anybody with a computer to run them. We will post a base algorithm on our blog, asking people to download and modify it to create their own versions. We will print their designs on our machines, or encourage them to print their own when possible, and drop them off. As our collection of polyps grows throughout the summer, we will add them to the base structure.


They're still in the early stages of this enormous project, but we thought there are many willing participants in the Fabbaloo sphere that might want to contact Bios to participate. "The project is still in concept design and will definitely develop in the coming months. We are looking for new members to help participate on the project so please feel free to contact Charles, Chris or Jess about possible opportunities and contributions."

Via Bios and ZER01