I was just reading the latest entry from Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, where she highlights what people would absolutely save from their home if it caught on fire. These photographs of small collections of very important things (like the one above) come from Foster Huntington’s project The Burning House: What Would You Take?

At the bottom of her post on the topic, Maria includes her own small bunch of treasures. Check out #7.

1. Wallet (recycled newspaper and plastic bag, fromHOLSTEE)
2. 1935 edition of Ulysses with sketches by Henri Matisseand 22-karat gold accents (Sure, the hefty tome would weigh me down — but I decided against the replaceable iPad and pair of giant Canon cameras in its favor.)
3. Glasses
4. Passport
5. MacBook Air
6. Phrenology bike helmet hand-painted by artist Danielle Baskin
7. Makerbot-printed space invader, a gift from a dear friend
8. Two-finger yellow LEGO ring from C+
9. iPhone
10. 1993 edition of Gertrude Stein’s 1938 children’s book,The World Is Round
11. Owl necklace from the 1950s, found in a middle-of-nowhere California vintage shop en route back from TED
12. 1 TB external hard drive with all my personal data, 15 years of photos, 100GB of music, and just about every piece of digital content I’ve ever owned (Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0/2.0, for the record)
13. Original drawing of Paula Scher, one of my big design heroes, by my friend and illustrator extraordinaireWendy MacNaughton. It reads: “Impossible happens.”
14. My Vibrams

MakerBotted gifts are special.

There’s something about seeing kids making things that just makes you think, “the future’s going to be fine.”

Here are some shots from the 3D Design/Printing workshop “On the Move”, hosted by MakerBot and NYU-Poly last week. MakerBot education wizards Liz Arum and Jon Santiago¹  were there to show kids ages 10-13 how to use free modeling software and a MakerBot to make mechanical parts like gears for larger moving objects.

1. Jon’s organization HTINK “provides academic enrichment programs and professional development services that connect Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) concepts to issues of environmental justice, community development and workforce readiness.” Find out more at www.htink.org [↩]

There’s an excellent feature at the Met blog on our Met MakerBot Hackathon last month, and a great spotlight on Anney Fresh’s re-imagined female deity puppet.

Check out the exciting note at the very end of the piece!

[Managing Museum educator for Gallery and Studio Programs Jacqueline Terrassa] was excited to examine “how the Met could provide a space, an occasion, a supportive environment where people could work for two intense days.” Though plans for similar events that utilize 3-D printing technology are still in their earliest stages, Terrassa was inspired by the artists’ and programmers’ powerful creative energy. The 3-D Hackathon was the first event of its kind at the Museum, but if the enthusiasm of the participants and the originality of the creations are any indication, then it certainly will not be the last.

We <3 the Met.

Untitled by anneyfresh

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This upload to Thingiverse got some attention recently and a post on the Thingiverse Blog, and I thought it deserved a little explanation from its creator, LouFlemal (below). Also, a quick shout out to the newest derivative of this map from drandolph.

In June, a new Thingiverse user, Society for Printable Geography (!), popped up to share this design for a terrain map of the US. It’s based on freely available data from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. The version in their pictures is a metal pendant, which looks great.

Lou’s version, though, is made on a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic by extruding Brown ABS plastic, and I think we can all agree that it brings a whole new look and feel to the design. The layers are turned 90 degrees from each other — which Lou tells me is just a lucky accident with his layer height setting of 0.3 mm — allowing us to really experience the altitude changes. You can immediately see the coastal lands of Louisiana and Florida at sea level, and the way the Piedmont plateau stretches up a corridor through the mid-Atlantic states. 

What strikes me as especially cool here is that the features that make Lou’s map fantastic are some of the features that people try to avoid sometimes with 3D printing. Our latest machine, The Replicator, is capable of outstanding resolution to the point that the layers of material are not really visible. But in this map, an intentionally low resolution makes all the difference. The fine lines on a single layer, Lou says, come from setting the temperature on his Mk8 extruder to 220, rather than the 240 he prefers to use with Brown ABS.

This definitely isn’t unique to the MakerBot as a medium. It’s like the way watercolor painting uses the blending of colors as an advantage, or how someone carving in wood might use the stroke marks of the carving tool to create intentional shapes and textures. It also reminds me of these salt and pepper shakers, which specifically use the little gaps between strings of plastic and the honeycomb infill pattern from Skeinforge.

How else could the features of the MakerBot process be used as an advantage?