MakerBot Industries

The photo booth was a big hit this year at Maker Faire Bay Area. After visiting the Robot Petting Zoo, we gave everyone the chance to take a few shots with one of the robots or express themselves with monster gloves and googly-eye headbands. See the full set in the slideshow below, or find them here on Flickr!

Thank you to all the fascinating MakerBot Operators who stopped by our booth at Maker Faire this weekend, especially those who were able to make it into our Family Portrait!

MakerBot Family Portrait: Maker Faire Bay Area 2012

Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 has been an incredible event, not just for the 100,000 or so people who came through here — still waiting for the official figures! — but also for the Makers. It’s been a weekend full of weirdness, magic, and…drama!

Here’s the scene: a middle school boy goes to a fantastic summer day camp, Galileo Learning, in Hillsborough, CA. He builds a great go-kart as his final project. But when Galileo transports the go-kart to Maker Faire, the steering wheel is dangling by a single bolt. Missing a nut!

The boy in our story, Adam, is a maker. He saw this problem and went out to fix it. When you’re at Maker Faire, you can probably find someone with the right size nut, right? Surely Tech Shop has one on hand.

Nope! Adam walked around the floor looking for a solution, and then… OH YEAH!

You can make the things you need! Over at the Tinkercad booth, Adam discovered that company’s incredible web-based design platform, and worked with the brilliant Henrik to draw out the right part. And since Tinkercad had a MakerBot right there on the table, he was able to make it on site in a matter of minutes. Shino writes over at the Tinkercad blog that the whole process took 45 minutes, beginning to end. Whoa.

Adam watches as The Replicator makes a part for his go-kart

Installing the nut, designed on Tinkercad

Thanks to the cooperation of friendly people in the Faire, Adam was able to slap the new part onto his go-kart and show his finished product how it was meant to be seen. As soon as we heard the story, we zoomed over to find him and decked him out with a MakerBot t-shirt and Awesome Award.

This is one rad kid, and I was so happy to hear his story, and he was happy to talk about it. Any teachers or parents out there wondering if kids really understand the power of being able to make things for themselves on a MakerBot, here’s a great example to remember.

Thanks for making our Maker Faire, Adam! And thank you to our great friends at Tinkercad for empowering kids the way they do.

If you will be volunteering for MakerBot as a booth volunteer this weekend, or if you are a MakerBot Operator or Thingiverse Maker, we invite you to join us Friday evening, after setup is done and before the festivities begin on Saturday, for a get together at our booth. Come and enjoy! Please be sure to let us know you’re joining us by registering here.

I know I’m not through my backlog of WYMB pictures, but just look at the one we got a minute ago via twitter!

These awesome, eager, MakerBotting 4th and 5th graders come to your screen from Boynton Beach, Florida’s Poinciana Elementary Magnet school for STEM. I’m going to have to dig deeply into teacher Kris Swanson’s blog now. I want to know all about what they are making, how they are designing, and how you get a dozen 10-year-olds to look that happy and excited for a picture.

A sincere happy Teacher Appreciation Week to all of you teachers.

As we did last month, we are about to live stream our MakerBot User Group New York (MUGNY) meeting! Please join us here on the blog, or come over to UStream.com. Enjoy!

Sorry folks. We’ve been getting some great pictures of MakerBot habitats in our inbox, but I have now acquired a backlog. Fixing that! But please do keep sending.

Here’s Ben’s TOM home. Looks like a busy workspace! What is that board attached to, Ben? It looks like it’s wrapped up in bubble wrap, making it doubly interesting.

Ben's Thing-O-Matic

A mere two days from now — 50 hours, to be precise — we will host the second big MUGNY (MakerBot User Group, New York) event of the year. We have been invited by Parsons School for Design, part of The New School in New York City. Check below for important details on how to be a part of this event.

For fans of 3D design, creativity, awesome things, learning, and making (did I leave anyone out?) this is going to be a blast. At the last MUGNY, we featured some MakerBot staff members and various short tutorials. This month, we will have two rock star designers from our community: PrettySmallThings and Cushwa.

PrettySmallThings, occasionally known as Kacie Hultgren, is a scenic designer, among other preoccupations. She uses her MakerBot to print scale models of detailed furniture and sets for Broadway productions, and you’ll see she has nearly 30 beautiful, original designs on Thingiverse. This is a rare opportunity to hear a specialized artist speak in person about her trade. Awesome!

Tom Cushwa, or Cushwa on Thingiverse, is similarly specialized. He creates 3D models for film and television, and has lately become fanatical about making his digital designs tangible with a MakerBot. His Owl Statue has been downloaded over 1,200 times; WHOA.

This event is open to the public and not one to miss. Check this address carefully, since Parsons does have buildings in different spots of the city. Join us on Thursday for enlightening talks and a chance to meet other MakerBot operators.

Where:

The New School
Parsons School of Design
“Masters in Design & Technology Thesis Show”
6 E 16th Street
12th Floor, Room 1200

When:

6:30pm – 8:00pm
MakerBot will provide light snacks and refreshments.

I was crushed this morning to hear of the death of Maurice Sendak at age 83, author of such timeless classics as Where the Wild Thing Are and In the Night Kitchen. When the popular author of books you loved as a child dies, you are sad for the loss of that childhood self as well as for the one who enriched those early experiences.

That said, my sense of sorrow at the death of Sendak is acute and specific. Here is an author that my adult self admires on level with that childhood self. (Have you picked up one of his books lately? Take another look: his work invites revisiting.) At grad school¹, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study writing for a series of sessions under Sendak at his workshop in Connecticut. The one thing that you wouldn’t guess meeting him – a tough-as-nails Brooklyn intellectual, talking with fiery passion and strong language about politics, art, music, opera, literature, and “people who are idiots” — is that he is not only a children’s book author, but the household name for children’s book authors.

It is important to acknowledge when taking time to remember him this week that he largely detested the children’s book industry that sprung up in the wake of his tremendous early successes, going so far to refer to the field as “a publishers scam.” He took great pains to draw the attention of my classmates to a whole range of notable exceptions throughout history, condemning those who write children’s books for the money, pandering to a sanitized, publisher’s notion of what children want to read: ”These writers are liars; these writers are selling something they don’t believe in. And children know it.” Here is an author as well-versed in Herman Melville and Henry James as Randolph Caldecott and Ruth Krauss. If you haven’t had a chance to read his collection, Caldecott & Co: Notes on Books & Pictures, you should hunt for it to get a sense of the depth of his thinking about the work he created — I suspect it will soon be coming back into print.

Here is where I can connect this discussion back directly to the MakerBot community. Sendak’s “secret” method, something he was never reticent about sharing, was his commitment to retain the raw spirit and untainted perceptions of his childhood self. It is not an easy process to make yourself so vulnerable to your experiences, to be an exposed nerve to the baffling and potentially hostile world erected by the adults towering over you. And yet, seeing the world through these eyes grants your creative efforts the directness of a truth unsullied by the cascade of assumptions about life, politics, and what people want to hear that shackle the adult writer wishing to speak to children at their level. The reason that good children’s books stand the test of time isn’t that they were tuned by a council of publishers to match statistical models for what children want to hear, but because they are darned good books that are true enough that children do not discard them as yet another finger-waggling speech from the adult-monsters.

I suggest that each of you take some time today to wander through the Thingiverse, this universe of invented objects that we are all contributing to, with your childhood eyes in place.² Test what you encounter against Sendak’s rubric for “truth and honesty” in creativity. You have the tools to create whole new worlds, but maybe the killer app for helping you create work that will be successfully transmitted from one human to another is to take up Sendak’s challenge — rather than making objects that you think people might like, create the object that your childhood self wishes into existence.

Today, May 8th, is National Teacher Appreciation Day, and MakerBot Blogger Andrew has gathered together a bunch of us at MakerBot to offer 3D printed apples to the many teachers who shaped our lives. Here’s my contribution to this effort: an apple for Maurice Sendak. Maurice Sendak — you and your voice will be dearly missed.

1. for Fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts [↩]
2. this will be far easier for our many 9-year-old customers, no doubt [↩]

The May 10th installment of MakerBot User Group New York (MUGNY) will offer MakerBot operators, Thingiverse makers, and Parsons students a rare glimpse into the working methods of two revered Thingiverse designers: Cushwa and PrettySmallThings. For the many of you who wrote in asking for in-depth design demos — these two demos will deliver knowledge and then some!

Special thanks to Parsons for inviting MUGNY to host this meeting in their beautiful space — a great chance for students using the Parsons MakerBot to learn more about the community of makers they are joining.

Where:

The New School
Parsons School of Design
“Masters in Design & Technology Thesis Show”
6 E 16th Street
12th Floor, Room 1200

 When:

6:30pm – 8:00pm
MakerBot will provide light snacks and refreshments.

Kacie Hultgren – “PrettySmallThings”

Kacie Hultgren, also known as PrettySmallThings on Thingiverse, is a scenic designer in New York City.  She uses her MakerBots to build scale models for set design models.  Kacie works as an associate on a variety of Broadway, US Tours and West End productions, in addition to pursuing her own design work in NYC and around the country.  At the May MUGNY, Kacie will share her work process and showcase scale models she has been working on.  She’ll also speak about how to harness the design constraints of printing with MakerBots to create models that bend the rules and push the limits of DIY 3D printing.

Tom Cushwa – “Cushwa”

Tom Cushwa, known as Cushwa on Thingiverse, is a 15 year veteran of the computer graphics, specializing in creating 3D models for film and television. He has worked with major studios all over the world. Tom has created characters for national ads, Superbowl spots, and major motion pictures. Always trying to stay ahead of the curve, Tom dived into 3D printing this past fall, creating models for the Thingiverse Playsets projects to be printed for the MakerBot CES booth. Recently, Tom created an Owl statue for Thingiverse that has now been downloaded over a thousand times, with over 40 people posting pictures of printed Owls on the site. Check out a small sample of his work as Big Character Inc. here.

Parsons The New School For Design

A pioneer in art and design education since its founding in 1896, Parsons has cultivated outstanding artists, designers, scholars, businesspeople, and community leaders for more than a century. Today, when design thinking is increasingly being employed to solve complex global problems, Parsons is leading new approaches to art and design education. Students at the Design & Technology program pursue forward thinking, creative, commercial, research-based, educational, and art-based career paths. Areas of study include Interaction, Physical Computing, 2D and 3D Animation, Motion Graphics, and Digital Filmmaking.