Steve Klabnik, CTO of CloudFab was so kind providing  the Fluid Forms community with a Beta-Access Code for their new marketplace for digital fabrication.

You want to make your 3d-models go real? Enter “fluidforms” at http://www.cloudfab.com/users/new and be among the first to get your Beta-Access to digital fabrication methods like SLA (Stereolithography), FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), and SLS (Selective Laser-Sintering) .

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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.

thanks to Ponoko and Solidsmack

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Hundreds of animals made out of white plastic gathered together in Linz yesterday afternoon. The animals are made from polyethylene boards and were cut out with a water-jet-cutter. Each creature was awakened to life by people from Linz during the last months, under guidance from the artist Roger Titley. This bizzare happening was the prelude  the of Visualized Cloud of Sounds 2009 in line with the Ars Electronica Festival 2009.

Hunderte weiße Kunststofftiere versammelten sich im Laufe des gestrigen Nachmittags in der Linzer Innenstadt. Die Kreaturen wurden aus Polyethylenplatten mit einem Wasserstrahlschneider ausgeschnitten.  Zum Leben erweckt wurden die Geschöpfe in den letzten Monaten durch die Bewohner von Linz  unter Anleitung der Künstler. Das bizzare Treiben unter Tags war der Auftakt zur Visualisierten Linzer Klangwolke 2009 im Rahmen des Ars Electronica Festivals 2009.

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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.

Beside this workshop Stephen and I will do a presentation about emotional interfaces for generative design. We would love to see you there as well.

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.

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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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DESIGN-PIRACY!

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Fast Company sees a new economy rising without forgetting about design-piracy as a possible threat for professional design as soon as every real object becomes a print-out. Back in 2001, when Napster was on its climax, Marshall Burns & James Howison called the phenomena “Napster Fabbing“. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde posted a tweet today announcing that the future of sharing is here (referring to the RepRap project).

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What is this design-piracy all about?

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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)

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WILL YOU BE ON BOARD?

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pic by Wikipedia

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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

( via dezeen, baunetz, fast company)

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Via Fabbaloo I found a 3d print service focused on 3d-printing your game avatar from digital models. Not unlike Figureprints, a digital fabricator recreating your virtual World of Warcraft character as a fully detailed 3D replic, Offload Studio turns your virtual Super Hero into a real one. This service might also be a big deal for the thousands of Warhammer enthusiasts out there…

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Offload Studio about their approach:

Imagine a system where the game player can take their virtual personal experience to their personal reality by holding in their hands their own unique customized game character. Offload Studios Inc. has developed a production pipeline that will support the GameMaker’s desire to diversify their player’s experience and realize physical custom products from the game. These artifacts are created as fully coloured figurines. Building upon technologies borrowed from the rapid prototyping industry, Offload Studios provides the spectrum of service required to bring your virtual world to your player’s physical reality.

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If you like to get a deeper insight into Offload Studio, I recommend you this interview with Bill Henderson, Founder of Offload Studios.

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Image by Mleak

Mleak studies art at Carnegie Mellon University and is very engaged in projects to make people aware of which food they are eating. Especially in her project „Where it came from“ she took the All-American-Lunch Meat „Bologna“ and etched pigs and roosters in it.

This raises a question: Does „Bologna“ consist out of both pork AND chicken? Well, but maybe this is not the point mleak wanted to make…as she tells us on her Flickr page: „Ultimately, I would like to show the entire process from animal to ambiguous pink slice of meat over the course of a package of lunch meat, beginning here with bologna. This neat packaged disc of food has always seemed so far removed from its source.“

But she’s not only experimenting with meat. Also cheese and toast can’t escape her laser. The Atkins Nightmare Project stands for a sandwich which already includes all of the ingedients, because they are etched on the bread. And last but not least the plays on words she did on American cheese questioning „the American legacy of the consumption of super-processed foods.“

Shouldn’t I thank God that I’m European?

Via Replicator

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Location of our first Creative Coding/Laser Cut Session, pic: Paraflyer

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That pic makes me pretty excited!!!

Tomorrow I am heading to the pictoresque lake region of Upper Austria to join Fluid Forms’ first Creative Coding and Laser Cut Session.

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Speedy 500 Laser Cutter, pic: SherTec

The next few days about 20 product designers, creative coders and media people crowd together to hack a nice piece of Hi-Tech: a brand new Speedy 500 laser cutter!

Stephen (@s_t_e_p_h_e_n) and Hannes (@hanneswalter) already left today with a mini-van full of stuff. Felt, glass, plastic, metal and much more is ready to be fed to Speedy, the gigantic fire-spitting monster.

The main aim of this session is to push limits of laser cutting (learn more aboutSpeedy 500 or watch what laser cutters can do) and realize some exciting product ideas.

I am not sure what happens if you give a creative and crazy bunch of people access to the latest digital manufacturing technologies. But I will definately share with you what I see and hear there!

So stay tuned, revisit our blog and/or follow us on twitter!

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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.

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