With CloudFab another start-up enters the digital fabrication and desktop manufacturing scene. Compared to Shapeways – a community-platform mainly for tinkerer (free shipping, minimum order is $25,-), CloudFab seems to target the professional market (according to Ponoko minimum order is $100,-). They want to connect maker and buyer of various 3D-printing and digital fabrication technologies. However, without a beta-access there’s not much to see at the moment. (Hey guys, won’t you send me a beta-code)
I really like the answer to the question “What is CloudFab?” though! “We’re clearing the fog from the digital fabrication market.” I would really appriciate that.
We’ve been asked to organize a creative coding workshop during the Ars Electronica Festival. We have invited a good mixture of creative minds (Martin Fuchs, Adi Hofmeister, Stefan Kainbacher, Cedric Kiefer, Kristian Kwiecinski, Andreas Nicolas, Michal Piasecki, Frederico Weber) and are looking forward to all the ideas and projects which will pop up during the workshop. Together with these guys we try to come up with personalised products resulting from the marriage of geometry, code and data. The parametrically generated forms will be produced and tested using the FabLab production facilities. Everyday from 16:30h to 18:00h the workshop is open to everyone. We’ll do a short presentation about the workshop and show the current state of the projects. Please come along and talk to us about creative coding, generative design, digital production or whatever else is on your mind. Thuesday the 8th at 16:30h there’s the final presentation of the workshop results.
On Friday the 7th at 14:00h Eva Tucek will hold a public pesentation about wax-3D-printing for jewelry.
If you can’t make it to the Ars Electronica Festival 2009 in Linz, we’ll keep you updated during the workshop on our blog, twitter, facebook and flickr.
Napster, Gnutella and Pirate Bay – brought product piracy to a level never reached before in history.
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What’s the next step? What will be the future of sharing? F A B B I N G!!!
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For me it seems that Corsair ships flagged with the Jolly Roger are spotted again at the horizon. This time we are not talking about famous pirate ships like the “Queen Anne’s Revenge” (Blackbeard’s ship). We are talking about modern pirate’s pretty manoeuvrable brigantines with more technocratic and less mystic-laden idioms like RepRap, Makerbot and fab@home etc. We are talking about desktop manufacturing bringing us step by step closer to a machine we only know from Star Trek – The Replicator. A machine that can produce almost everything (from spoons to penties) with the push of a button.
These days I have the impression that the Digital Manufacturing Revolution stays in the spotlight again. A light that’s also unveiling the dark side of 3d-printing, fabbing or whatever you call the shift from manufacturing goods in factories to create objects directly on your desktop: .
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Imagine you can download any virtual object as a file that can be read by digital manufacturing machines such as laser cutters or 3d printers and created by the push of a button. Once again – you hit the button of your keyboard and a complex object, perhaps a Rolex (yes yes, I know, that’s quite far in the future, we are just at the stage of fabbing spoons and bowls…) is printed out by your desktop mashine? Awesome?!?
This part of the story works out pretty well: You can create your own products on your desktop, shipping costs go down to a minimum, local business can be strengthened… But what if I start printing out copyright material (like the Rolex in the example). What if I download tons of illegal production files and print them out? Pretty scary for many of you huh?
Compare this imaginable (but not far away) scenario with what has happened in the music industry and you get an idea of the impact fabbing & co will have on whole businesses on a worldwide scale!
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Will this scenario happen? DEFINATELY Can we stop it? DEFINATELY NOT! (And that’s fine even if it can be painful as well, but the time is ready for the next step)
D-Shape developed the first 3D-printer for large scale objects in 2008. They recently presented small scale version of the Radiolaria Pavillon. It was designed by the founder of Shiro Studio, Andrea Morgante and will be build in Pontedera (there’s the headquarter of Piaggio, manufacturer of the Vespa), Italy in 2010 in its actual size.
The idea of concrete printing has been around for a while. But the Radiolaria Pavillon is a much more attractive example than the objects shown by contourcrafting.org so fare – especially to the media. ( via dezeen, baunetz, fast company) The project by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis got some funding in 2008, but it seems to be making little headway compared to the Radiolaria Pavillon by D-Shape . That reminds me a bit on Desktop Factory vs. Makerbot. But the technologies used seem to be different and as the large amount of current small scale 3D printing systems show, the market for 3D printing system should be large enough anyway.
I’m wondering how much hand finishing the surface of the actual 3D-printed shape requires, until it’s as nice as shown on the renderings? And I guess the small 3D-printed model with the nice surface, shown on some pictures, is done with a Z-corp. But there’s still some time until 2010
Using the momentum we give you a glimpse of what we are compassing next and consequently like to introduce the QRring and the QR Cuff Links to you!
Yep! Soon you can leave your old-fashioned, granny style rings at home and show off your 21st century interpretation of the classic signet ring. And the QR Cuff Links will make it for an action loaded scene in the next James Bond movie
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This was the “pain in the a**” creation of the first prototype:
Fluid Forms is interested in cheap rapid prototyping and 3D-printing solutions to test new ideas and to experiment with. That’s why we’ve been looking forward to the launch of the Desktop Factory. But I still don’t even know what kind of material it’s going to use. (Do you know?) Quite a while ago the announcement of the “world 1st 3D-printer under USD 5.000,-” was such a big shout out in the media – and we’re still waiting. Another machine I’m very interested in buying would be the LOM-machine by Mcor Technologies. I signed up for their newsletter, but I didn’t get any information so far. Today I dropped an email so they know that I really want to buy such a machine. Hope I’ll get some information soon.
Out there are many other creative coding and open design communities like processing, generatorX, many universities and artist waiting for cheap solutions to bring their ideas to physical life. They don’t need a perfect or flashy 3D-printer and neither do we. Much more important is that the solution is (a) cheap to buy / make and (b) cheap to operate and maintain. If it can (c) be hacked / improved easily and there’s (d) a community behind to ask for help, it’s even better.
The open source 3D-printing solutions makerbot, reprap or fab@home are obviously following Paul Graham’s famous six principles for making new things: Find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
And I think that’s absolutely the right way, because we are going to order either a makerbot or a reprap machine. Does anyone have experience with both machines and knows about advantages and can recommend one of them? (Even though the Makerbot isn’t officialy launched yet)
If the Desktop Factory is launched or I can get hold of a Mcor fine, but meanwhile we’ll be happyly using the open source versions.
I have found some (worth to share with you) thoughts from Stephen (@s_t_e_p_h_e_n) hidden deep inside our (old) website:
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Cassius represents the direction in which we can steer our future. Cassius demonstrates that anyone can realize their ideas as physical objects.
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At present we have two hurdles.
The first hurdle is that generative production machines do not yet enable us to produce anything we wish.
The second hurdle is the difficulty of communicating an idea to a machine without first undergoing years of training. This second hurdle is addressed by Cassius.
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Before the industrial revolution we could go to a tradesman, a cabinet maker for example, and communicate our idea for a new table. These ideas would then be realized within boarders of our financial means and the skills of the tradesman. Upon the arrival of industrialized production we lost this freedom, to a large extent, in favor of prices that a larger portion of our population could afford.
In 1978 in “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” we heard with pleasure and hope of a machine that could create something that is “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”. The machine, called a Replicator termed originally in “Star Trek” could, at a push of a button, synthesize food. This could be seen as the second generation of such machines. The third generation was presented in “The Star of the Unborn”. It was not a machine but a human, known as “The Worker”, who could turn ideas into reality.
Unless we really like bad tea the first generation was not much use to us. The second generation required special skills to program it and represents a similar situation to that in which we find ourselves now. The third generation is where Fluid Forms is working towards. In the Fluid Forms’ vision, the job of “The Worker” is performed by a combination of “Design Interfaces” and generative production machines.
As does the tradesman, the Design Interfaces maintain the borders represented by the capabilities of the production machines and gives us feedback relating to the price. As “The Worker” interprets our ideas, so too does the Design Interface: through its ease-of-use, it communicates our ideas to the production machines.
Ever dreamed about a slightly (or even completely) different body? Do you want a new liver or do you need to substitute some inter-vertebral disks? Why don’t you start with – let’s say an ear. Can you imagine a plastic surgeon, using a Fluid Forms Online-Design-Tool redefining the contours of your ear, getting rapid prototyped afterwards with a 3D-tissue-printer. Or even order not just the clothes, but the body parts on myvirtualmodel. You think you can get the body of your dreams with genetic manipulation too? How about transferring the information about your (second or third) physical body to another galaxy to print it out over there? I heard rumours saying that beaming can be quite dangerous.
Yeah, I know – that’s all Sci-Fi and scary too (at the moment). Anyway, 3D-tissue printing is a fascinating technology, with many possible applications within medicine, not just plastic surgery. However, it will definitely take a few more decades and at least $1billion until we’ll get some functioning human organs.
In times of loads of Web-2.0-Best-of-Lists (for Blogs, Webpages,…) we offer something quite strange:
A list of brilliant books we read recently.
YES BOOKS! WE REALLY MEAN BOOKS! THESE BULKY THINGS MADE OUT OF REAL PAPER!
We figured out, that a good part of the ideas we develop, decisions we take and strategic moves we make can be somehow traced back to books we have read. The Internet environment is a great place to find fast and up-to-date information. It’s daily business to keep up with it. But the slow media has its place to.
Reading a book always allows us to take a birds-eye-view on our ideas, rethink our course, our decisions and our motivation.
Does reading a book gives you inspiration too? Then go ahead…
Do you know the umbrella term that describes what Fluid Forms is doing?
I am working at Fluid Forms nearly half a year and still find obstacles when I describe people (my horror scenario is the ominous “elevator pitch”) the business we are so passionate about. Quite bad for someone who studied communications, isn’t it?
Are we doing rapid prototyping? Is it additive fabrication? Is it fabbing? Or is it even 3d printing after all? Can we cover all applications for technologies we use at Fluid Forms with one certain term?
Hm, that seems to be a brainteaser.
A few days ago Frank Piller opened a (due) discussion with an entry on his blog Mass Customization & Open Innovation News about taxonomies in mass customization. Some of the most important takeouts are:
Rapid Prototyping is no longer suitable in most instances as umbrella term because rapid prototyping is only one appliance for technologies like CNC, laser cutting or 3d printing
A growing number of people is using “additive fabrication” or “additive manufacturing” to refer to systems that join together liquid, powder, or sheet materials to form parts (e.g. Cassius or Earth-White)
Consequently you refer to CNC and laser cutting machines as “subtractive fabrication“
Piller assumes that “3d printing” will become the most popular mainstream (non expert) term to catch (at least) all additive fabrication methods
Fabbing is a nice jargon to refer to additive fabrication and stay cool
Additive and subtractive fabrication sounds good to me. 3d printing might be useful in general use but won’t work as an umbrella term at Fluid Forms because we also use subtractive systems like CNC (e.g. Earth Bowl).
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The categorization of technology is getting a bit clearer and easier now. BUT there is another big uncertainty remaining:
What is it that we offer to prosumers? (Is prosumer actually the right term?)
I don’t think we offer additive fabrication to our customers. To some technology enthusiasts this term might appeal. The majority of visitors on our website might prefer user co-creation. Or user-generated design? What about community product design and individual design? Uff it’s getting misty again.
What do you guys think? What terms do you use? What terms do you think are the most appropriate?
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