Official video of Electro Tennis (with my Makerbot)

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After my two recent posts discussing and sharing the things I 3D printed for the frog SXSWi opening party, frog released official videos of each of the installations. In the Electro Tennis video (embedded below) you can see my Makerbot toiling away in our workshop warehouse (it’s actually 3D printing a frog SXSW key chain, but never you mind that).

By the way, as I was being interviewed on-site, my Makerbot was in the background printing little finish-line flags I designed for the MAKE Magazine “MAKE” area at our party; there were bristlebot kits that we had routed out a race track for, but ended up not using. If you were there you may or may not have seen five of the intended six little flags laying about. I’m holding one of the flags in my gloved hands because it was cold outside and the print was warm.

You can see the rest of the frog SXSW 2012 videos here.

Change is a foot. A big, big foot.

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Due to the recent purchase of Posterous by Twitter, I’ve decided to not worry about what was going to happen with the content on My Plastic Future and pre-emptively move to a different blog host.

I decided that I’d go with WordPress.com. I could have put a WordPress implementation on one of my web hosts but I just wanted something easy and simple and not worry about maintenance (I just want to post!)

There will be some rough edges with images and previously linked-to articles, but I hope to get most things rectified as quickly as possible.

From Novelty to Necessity

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Electro Tennis at the frog SXSWi opening party

Electro Tennis at the frog SXSWi opening party

For the past 14 years, the company I work for, frog, has been hosting the SXSW Interactive opening party. For the past three of those years I’ve played a role in it: brainstorming installation ideas, and building/coding really cool experiences for our thousands of attendees.

This year the core concept was turning digital experiences into analog ones, and vice versa. Additionally, one of the consistent themes of our party is to play with scale. So one of the experiences we set out to build was “Electro Tennis” (an electro-mechanical version of the classic Pong video game). But we decided to build it on an enormous scale — two 30′ x 25′ playing “courts”, each with a 12″ cube for a ball and 4′ x 3.5′ water tank for a paddle. In other words: giant.

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A tool for the people

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I just wanted to express something that makes me happy. I was going to tweet this, but I couldn’t get all the right words into 140 characters.

I’ve talked to a lot of people about 3D printing, across all ages and across all genders, and I get nothing but excitement about the possibilities.

What’s important is that it isn’t just the “yeah, yeah, people are excited about 3D printing” part, but rather that this is one of the few instances where a tool that you use to make something at home doesn’t have a gender-specific stereotype attached to it. What other tool can both the man of the house and the woman of the house fight over to make something on?

Sadly, one doesn’t get the same response across the board with, say, talking about a circular saw, or conversely, waxing poetic about a sewing machine; there are pre-conceived notions about who can/should use what tools in the world today.

What I like about MakerBot, as opposed to some other DIY 3D printer companies out there, is that they seem to get this. You see Bre showing off the latest Makerbot with giant geared hearts, fantasy play sets, blue rabbits, red robots, and brightly-colored remote control vehicles. Go to other companies’ sites and you’ll see lots of gears and boring parts to make more printers. They seem to be very short-sighted in what they see the use of their printers as being, or who their users are.

The community handles it very well. Take a trip over to Thingiverse. Yes you’ll see gears and parts to make more printers, but you’ll also see jewelry, robots, swans, sunglasses, and so many other things that are appealing to young and old, boys, girls, and even animals! This is what makes 3D printing so exciting to so many; anyone and everyone can make whatever they can imagine. Imagination knows no age, class, or gender bounds.

Personally, I hope it stays this way.

3D printers – toys for the surrealist’s playground

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Apologies in advance: this post is more scattered than normal as there is no story here, just passion and feeling. And some pictures.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 3D printers can, more easily than almost any other tool out there, turn dreams into reality. The barriers to the physical manifestation of almost any idea have been greatly reduced, and there is no reason that every thing one can envision shouldn’t be 3D printed, regardless of how silly it may seem.

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Cottage Frottage; or, making creative fun at home.

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When I was 10, my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in Pennsylvania for a summer. My grandparents, apparently not knowing what to do with a 10-year-old boy, enrolled me in summer school. Yeah, total bummer.

There was a week or so before school started so they took me to a toy store to get me something to pass the time with. I picked the Tomy Little Van Goes toy — basically a bunch of interchangeable plastic plates and a holder that you put paper over and rubbed to get the outline of different vans you could then color. I thought this was great, until three days later when I got bored with it because there weren’t enough of the kinds of pieces I wanted to see.

As I’ve been thinking a lot about crafty things for groups lately, I recalled my initial joy of this childhood toy, and the frustration at not having all the things I wanted it to. Then I remembered that I have a 3D printer! What a great thing to be able to design and print!

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