MakerBot Industries

Don't let your digital designs go to waste!

This New Year’s Eve 12/31/2010 has been declared¹ National Orphan Design Day!²

What does this mean to you?  As someone who has ever fired up a 3D drawing program, you probably have lots of designs lying around that haven’t been uploaded to Thingiverse.  These designs have been hidden in some lonely directory on your hard drive long enough.  Tomorrow is the day to give those orphan designs a home where they can roam free, frolic and play with other like-minded digital orphans.  There are a lot of reasons you may not have uploaded these designs yet.

• Perhaps you don’t own a 3D printer?  Maybe someone who owns a 3D printer would love to make one.  Heck, they might even be willing to send you a copy.
• Perhaps it is unfinished?  If you upload your Thing with an open license, others might be interested enough in your work to finish it up!
• Perhaps you thought it would only interest you?  Probably not!  Even if that Thing only suited your purposes, someone else might be able to modify it to suit their problem.

I’ve got several things sitting on my hard disk at home.  Little one-off toys, fixes, half-finished designs, and small proofs-of-concepts.

What abandoned or orphaned works are you going to upload to Thingiverse tomorrow?

1. By me [↩]
2. Photo courtesy of Paolo Magari [↩]