Sometimes I shy away from writing about instances of MakerBot being honored for this or that. There are a lot of those things, and I figure readers of this blog probably understand that our products are cool. On Friday we participated in something that I do want you to know about, though, since you are, by virtue of the act of just reading this blog, part of it.

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival, specifically for “creating an entire ecosystem for desktop 3D printing.” What is an ecosystem without all the flora and fauna? The people who own our 3D printers, or interact with the world of personal fabrication in other ways – by spending weekends in hackerspaces or uploading design ideas to Thingiverse or commenting on others’ ideas and creations – are the people who breathe life into this ecosystem. So our hat’s off to you.

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis accepting the Maslow Silver Hammer at the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards April 30, 2012

Now let me tell you about Justin Bieber. Read the rest of this entry »

Kids getting a good look at a MakerBot Replicator last week at SXSW

Here’s a nice quick read for your second third cup of coffee this morning. A group of undergrads and grad students at Stanford who came together in a mechanical engineering class are using their tools and knowledge to open minds of Bay Area students.

And are you surprised to hear they use 3D printing to do the job? MFA student Eugene Korsunskiy:

Our whole point is that manipulating matter with your hands is how you get a sense of empowerment that you can change the world around you. … There’s a lot of high-level education policymakers who in theory claim to agree that the future of the country depends on a workforce that’s creative…but no one’s doing anything about it. … As [they]’re talking about how creativity needs to be expanded, shop classes are being cut…so we decided: “We are going to do something about this.”

The team lets young students design their ideas in Autodesk 123D and print them on the spot. Can you imagine what it would have been like to have that at your disposal when you were a kid? And to the point, we’re not talking about only advanced high school kids. The younger the better, it seems.

 Working with sixth graders and Yahoo! executives, the team was surprised to find that the younger students were more creative.

“It’s really sad to see what happens between those ages that really squashes any semblance of fearless, creative endeavors,” Korsunskiy said.

Fearless is right.

From SmartPlanet.com, via SlashDot:

Students from Stanford and Finland’s Aalto University have developed a prototype laptop that can be disassembled in less than three minutes without the use of any tools. Once it’s taken apart, the laptop’s materials can easily be recycled. SmartPlanet talks to the inventors about their design concept and gets a hands-on demo of the process.

The video above shows how this laptop with a very modular design can be quickly disassembled without the use of tools. If you’ve ever taken apart a laptop, you know the pain and frustration that comes from trying to find and keep track of the nigh infinite number and variety of screws that hold these things together. As these students demonstrate, it just does not have to be this way. Interestingly, there may not be much of a need for a modular designed laptop as long as the components themselves were sufficiently modular. This is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect to be uploaded to Thingiverse.

Just imagine printing a custom laptop case, slapping in some totally modular parts, and rocking out on your new laptop 3 minutes later.