3D printing vs mass production: Part III Everything you own sucks…
This is the third installment of a series of blog posts on 3D printing vs mass production. The other parts are: The Power of Unique, Manufacturing Complexity and Marketing Promise and Wish Fulfillment.
Everything you own sucks…
There has been a widening credibility gap between the promises marketing makes and what is actually being delivered for years now. And even though some marketeers struggle with the underpinnings of their industry they also need to keep telling us lies. They can not admit that they”ve been lying to us for so long. They can not just come out and say, “buying a new toothpaste will never make you happy.” Also they”ve been obscuring an even darker deeper secret. That secret is that Mass Production is by design unable to give us the “best of anything.” Mass production can provide us with wonderfully complex things and cheap things but it can not give you the best shoe, camera or shirt. Mass production is bound to making millions or thousands of t
Columbia GSAPP 3D printed designs Watercolor
Alistair Gill and Veronika Schmid held a Saturated Models seminar at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. During the seminar the Master’s students explored 3D printing and created 3D printed objects. i.materialise made the resulting 3D prints. This is the second interview with a team of participating architecture students. The first one is here.
1. Who are you? We are Kasey Josephs and Kurt Rodrigo both originally from the Western United States, hailing from Arizona and California, respectively. We are recent graduates of Columbia University”s Master of Advanced Architectural Design program and are passionate about architecture, music, and cake.Â
2. What is Watercolor? Watercolor as a medium blends color to blur the boundary between hues and tones. The Watercolor Wall is a prototype for a wall paneling system that uses this similar technique to create dynamic space around the wall. The relationship between the user and the wal
A new i.materialise 3D printing material: Prime Gray
Today we”re introducing a new 3D printing material on i.materialise, Prime Gray. We”ve been listening and trying to determine what designers and 3D modelers need and want from their 3D printing materials. A lot of people we”re looking for highly detailed materials, smoother materials and also wanted visually appealing 3D prints. Internally people were smitten by the Prime Gray material, originally developed and used  for high quality visual prototypes for consumer electronics. Some of us (OK, me) we”re skeptical about the gray color. But, we evaluated it and it turned out to also be a very nice and classy looking material for design and art pieces as well as character models. Today we”re introducing this material temporarily for one month.
Prime Gray is sterolithography material that is Air Force Gray. The color gives designs a much “tighter” and well defined overall look. The material is feels luxurious to the touch and is very smooth. Flat surfaces are shi
The Google SketchUp and i.materialise Pimp your Vehicle Challenge
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We’re asking you to come up with a SketchUp design that would be 3D printed. This product would improve your car, boat, bike, Segway, pogo stick, unicycle or any other vehicle. Your design should show what could be possible if you were allowed to improve the vehicles that you drive. You should design whatever it is that you desire. We’d like your design to be a product that you believe would work in the real world. We’re looking for creativity and a product that would be an eye opener. It could be something for everyone or it could be something for a tiny group of people. Or it could be just for you. You can submit your entry and a short explanation here . The contest starts today and you have until the 14th of July (12PM CET) to Pimp your Vehicle. You can enter here.
 The Google SketchUp team and i.materialise will carefully examine your designs and select the winning entries. You can use the handy new i.materialise SketchUp plugin to easily make your SketchUp design 3D prin
3D printing vs mass production: Part II Manufacturing Complexity and Marketing Promise
This is the second post in a series covering 3D printing versus mass production. You can find the first here. The other parts are: The Power of Unique, Everything you own Sucks and Wish Fulfillment. This post deals with the increase in manufacturing complexity that accompanies mass produced products. Mass production is in my opinion gradually undermining its own strengths by focusing not on increased utility for consumers but rather on things such as increased complexity. At the same time unrealistic and product unrelated promises by marketing create a gap between what products deliver and what they promise.
II. Manufacturing Complexity and Marketing Promise
The increase in the complexity of the cheap consumer products we can buy today is staggering. I can now buy a 12 megapixel camera with12. a 3 inch LCD and 3X digital zoom for $99. If you read this post in a few months the same camera model will have 14 or 20 megapixel. I can remember how limited and expensive the f
Columbia GSAPP Saturated Models 3D printed: Corset
Alistair Gill and Veronika Schmid held a Saturated Models seminar at Columbia”s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. During the seminar the Master”s students explored 3D printing and created 3D printed objects. i.materialise supported the project and we were amazed and impressed with the results. To showcase them we will be doing a series of interviews with the participating architects starting with the Corset team. Â
1. What is Corset?
We produced an object. This object doesn’t consist of its material aspects but of relationships between the atmosphere, between the infinite number of possible qualities / properties / situations that can be attached to it. We produced a corset. Our corset enters into a machinic assemblage with the human body. It extends therefore beyond any earlier distinction between the mechanical and the organic and includes both domains. There is a dual relation between the body and the object. The body forms and deforms and
3D printing vs Mass production Part I: The Power of Unique
Many people have been talking lately of 3D printing versus Mass Production. The implication is that localized individualized production will supplant the current manufacturing paradigm with a third industrial revolution. We will all become manufacturers and make exactly what we want using 3D printing. Although I applaud such optimism and would postulate that 3D printing will bring about a third industrial revolution I don”t think it is “going to go down” in that way. Instead, I think 3D printing will develop in a more concentrated manner and focus on Bleeding edge consumers and 1% of all goods. 3D printing will not be used by “everyone to make anything” but rather be used by some to make the things they care about most. Furthermore, I believe that through this path 3D printing will come to slow down mass production and ameliorate the heavy burden that mass manufacturing is exacting on our planet. This is the first part of 5 blog posts detailing how I believe this process will unfold
RapidFit+ using 3D printing to check mass produced parts
One of the things I completly did not understand before I came to work here was Rapid Fit+. Rapid Fit+ is a Materialise busines unit that sells fixtures that test mass produced parts. I simply had no idea that a market for this existed and that you could increase the accuracy of 3D printed parts to such a degree that you could measure mass produced things. I sat down with Jo Massoels the Business Director of RapidFit+ to understand what it is they do and how it works.
In the automotive world you have the OEM”s and Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers. An OEM is an Original Equipment Manufacturer, the car brand that sells the car such as BMW or Bentley (all Rapid Fit+ customers). A Tier 1 supplier is a company such as Rieter, Magna, Plastal  that sell directly to the OEMs (these are also Rapid Fit+ customers). Rieter for example is a company that might make all the fabric and textile parts in your car. Faurecia supplies entire plastic and seating systems. Magna supplies many things i
i.materialise at TEDxKids 3D printing for ten year olds
On June 1st i.materialise participated at TedxKids Brussels. This event brought together people as diverse as Walter Bender (of Sugar Labs), Maarten Lens Fitzgerald (the Founder of Layar), Mark Frauenfelder (Editor of Make Magazine and Boing Boing), Mark Surman (of the Mozilla Foudation), Gever Tully (of the impecably awesome Tinkering School), the great team of Technology Will Save Us and more inspiring and wonderful people. Also in the mix were Franky and I on behalf of i.materialise. One part of the day was to give a TED style presentation to a group of 450 adults. Â
The “TED style presentation” was daunting enough. I mean you”re standing on the same red dot as that mind blowing guy with the windmills. At the same time it does not help that all the other speakers have clearly done this kind of thing before and that everything is being recorded and simulcast. All I wanted was one crappy speaker so that I”d look good. Alas, the presentations were all informative
3D printing for model makers
3D printing is not competing in any way with traditional model making. Instead it is adding something new and exciting to the range of tools model makers are using. What if you were working on a scale model and needed a complex part and time was valuable? You’d simple have it 3D printed and integrate it with the existing model. Here are 2 examples of how model makers turned to 3D printing (and i.materialise) to make it happen.
Turnova
Turnova is an urban development project going on in the Belgian city of Turnhout. Professional model maker Piet Vanherle was commissioned to create a large scale model for Turnova. One of the eye catchers in the whole project is a ‘stoa’ (colonnade) that connects the northern and southern part of the project. Looking at the size and the complexity of this remarkable piece, the model maker turned to 3D printing. According to Piet Vanherle, finalizing this piece was tough, but the result turned out gorgeous. On demand of his customer, he spray painted the
