Art Info wrote a very cool piece on what 3D printing means, not only for artists and designers, but for everyone in the world. The article featured MakerBot’s collaboration with fashion designer, Asher Levine, who describes how 3D printing makes prototyping easier:

“The fashion industry is stuck in this archaic method of manufacturing, while we’re on the cusp of a new method,” Levine told us. He also let us in on a secret: “I can’t sketch sunglasses.” Instead, he molded models from clay and subtly tweaked the designs using a CAD program — “move this in a bit, move this out a bit, make it a quarter-of-an-inch shorter” — input them into his Replicator, and had a revised version in just nine hours — more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply than the traditional method. The machine took the design and extruded melted ABS plastic through a nozzle onto a platform, building the sunglasses layer by layer via FDM (think ’90s, line-by-line dot-matrix printers, but in three dimensions). Thanks to Thingiverse, Makerbot’s open source website, you can actually download Levine’s designs and make them at home — the only catch is that it’s BYOMB. Bring your own MakerBot.”

The writer also paid a visit to Material ConneXion’s and the article includes a slideshow of 3D-printed objects from the Print/3D exhibition.

Read the full article here!