TED is a conference and sadly I've never been able to go. From what I've seen and heard it should be quite the experience. They have a lot of videos on their site. These videos are some of the most inspiring, awesome and exciting things you can find on the internet. And I do not think I am overselling them. They are all presentations, sometimes by politicians but also by doctors, other academics and regular people. They are aboutoutlining research, stories of people's experiences and a lot of them are simply mindblowing.

To kick off, "Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who builds walking kinetic sculptures that he calls a new form of life. His "Strandbeests" walk the coastline of Holland, feeding on wind and fleeing from water." If you want to see just what is possible with Shapeways, look at what he has made with standard plastic tubing and think what you could make.

Think poverty and data visualisations are boring? This is amazing. You will also not believe the end of the video, it is ridiculous, in a good way.

This is an awesome hack where Johnny Lee makes some simply stunning stuff using a Wii.

Philippe Starck, the namesake of one of our servers, has a very funny presentation here titled, "Why design?". It is also a wonderful look into design.

Dust as art.

A chart outlining why someone chose to be a designer.

A tap should not be that hard to design but even tap UI-design could be broken.

Chernobyl matroesjka dolls, or how to turn something whimsical that tourists buy into art.

Design and art nowadays seems to be very much about the here and now. This is a great video about designing things for the future. It is the story of the Oxford oak beams. Via ThoughtWax.

A great post jampacked with lots of art and architecture links and stories. My favorite part, "Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.” Green ready-to-wear clothes on the homeless brought to you by Ms. Prada. Sometimes I feel that I really could not make some of this stuff up if I tried.

We've been talking a lot lately about hackers or makers turning technology on its' head by making their own things. For most makers its about changing their own items and adding functionality to them. Some people however change other people's technology. This is a rather evil hack where someone has hacked the airplane seats of the people sitting in front of them so that they can not recline their seats.

Shapeways is all about designing unique objects, personalizing the world around you. What we hope to do for a lot of 'things' in the future people are doing now with mash-ups of music and web applications. In an age of ever present media and advertising clouding our world people are also increasingly re-mixing branding and marketing messages put out by companies. The most famous of these groups is AdBusters. They have a hilarious and at the same time thought provoking gallery here.

It is interesting to note how similar the work of AdBusters is to some of the Worth1000 Photoshop contests. I loved the bad ads one.

Graffiti Research Lab is also doing some amusing and cutting edge stuff in this field, such as their laser projection of the NSA logo on the Verizon building.

This is food for thought for consumers but poses interesting problems for brands. Unilever won a lot of awards and attention with their Dove real beauty campaign. If you watch the movie it squarely blames the beauty industry for a lot of self-image problems women have. It promotes Dove as the brand that cares about women. The campaign website is all about making a difference and The Dove Self-Esteem fund. This, “was developed to help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes.”

The campaign is a fantastic one, way ahead of the curve. But, in a connected world where everyone has a lot of information as well as the tools to re-mix any message it also sets them up for a fall. You see, Unilever also owns the deodorant brand Axe. Those of you familiar with the Axe campaigns will probably know that the way that Axe depicts women might not exactly be in line with the lofty values outlined by Dove and its' Self-esteem fund. It was only a matter of time really until someone juxtaposed Axe footage alongside Dove footage to chilling effect.It seems that in connected world with few limits to information one person with a little leisure time can take on a corporate giant.

The whole Open-source, make, hack, re-mix and mash-up movement, as disparate as it is, stands to redress the balance in a lot of industries, advertising is just one of these. If advertising is about getting your message out to as many eyeballs as possible open source tells us that “given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” the plane where those two intersect will be one of the most interesting one's to watch in the coming years. Will consumer empowerment crush corporate communications like a bug? Or will the eyeballs themselves become shallow?

Photo credit: marissaorton

We have a brand new contest for you guys!

This time we're doing a contest for the Dutch Design Week(site is in Dutch). This is the Netherlands' premier design event and we're proud to be a part of it.

Together with TNO(a large Dutch research institution) and five designers we will be organizing Virtual Making. This will be an exhibit along with series of lectures and master classes about the possibilities of rapid manufacturing. It will showcase the 3D printed art and design object made by the designers and give people the opportunity to see a 3D printer and a fearsome looking CNC machine. We hope that the technology showcase coupled with the inspiring work from the designers really show what is possible with 3D printing and other direct to digital manufacturing technologies.

The talented designer's who will be exhibiting at Virtual Making are: Studio Thol, Kocx Ontwerpen, PeLiDesign, Wouter Scheublin and Design Drift. All these designers are industrial or product designers and this is also the focus of the Dutch Design Week. We're in awe of their products and success but think that we might have the raw talent in our community that could make a 3D printed work that could comfortably sit along side theirs at the exhibition.Could you be that talent?

So the theme for this contest is: Every Day Design. A completely unique every day object. Something in your home, in your hands that no one has ever considered. Would kitchen cutlery be different if it were 3D printed? Would a new object find its' way into the home because of these new manufacturing techniques? We hope this gets you guys thinking and designing.

To enter simply upload your design to Shapeways and add the tag DDW to it. You can submit designs to the contest until Sunday the 21^st of September 12:00 CET. The winner will be design with the highest rating on Shapeways and will be announced on the 30^th of September. The winner's model will be printed out and exhibited at the Dutch Design Week for thousands of designers and the design-curious. After DDW it will be shipped to you so you can have it. In addition the winner will receive $250 in free 3D printing from Shapeways!

Hacking has traditionally been an activity whereby people tried to break into computer systems and networks. They either did this with malice(to steal credit card information) or good intentions(to improve the security of the system or to lean how it works). The former spawning the term black hat and the latter spawning the term white hat. Hacking initially started with phone phreaking and went via the era of Kevin Mitnick to the script kiddies of today. Kevin Mitnick himself by the way went from a hacker who was imprisoned to a well respected security consultant and speaker with probably the world's coolest business card pictured above.

Hackers were brought to us through such cinematic gems as 'The Net' and 'Hackers.' The former should be especially entertaining if watched now. Ever notice how the movies and TV always seem to get computers wrong? Look at this nails on the blackboard cringing clip from CSI New York for a good example. Of course there were good hacker movies too, such as the impeccable true to life portrayal presented in War Games. Despite this computer hacking culture is very much alive and well today present in such awesome things as the Black Hat Conferences.

The term hacking is now however under threat. From all sides it is being stretched into all directions much like Oprah's pants. Sites, such as LifeHacker give you tips on how to make your life more efficient. Other sites show you how to hack every day objects such as coke machines. Hacking is now turning into a term that means, “experimenting playfully with technology.” It is becoming a synonym for make. Even though many “hacking sites” now talk about Hacking Furby rather than the intricacies of computer security the spirit of hacking is still alive in them. A curious group of pioneers exploring, learning about and experimenting with new technology: hacking if you will.

People are even hacking Ikea, with this niche instructional post Hack-a-Lack, a tool for people who have to put together a lot of Ikea Lack tables.

A World of Warcraft treadmill, so you walk as much as your avatar walks anyone?

The original hardware lifehacker was of course MacGyver and here is a complete list of problems solved by MacGyver, oh wikipedia font of knowledge will you never cease to amaze me. (via Kottke.org)

Ever wanted a touch screen PSP?

Or want to see a Roomba being controlled by a Wii balance board?

Photo credit: Nathan Y under Creative Commons share alike.

We're working hard at comming up with new tutorials for you guys so that it becomes easier to upload models to Shapeways. We have a number of regular tutorials on site but are experimenting with video too. Bart, our in house modeling guru, made this video describing how you can fix non-manifold meshes.

Watch it here.

Non-manifoldness is something a lot of modelers and designers really don't encounter untill they start designing something that has to be 3d printed. The explanations of manifold and non-manifold is rather complicated but we will give you some more background in a future post. For now, Bart can show you how to solve it.

We really like the idea video tutorials but want to know if you do too. Is the video useful? Did it load quickly? How was pausing and replaying parts of the video? Would you prefer a video tutorial or would you like it a lot more if we just did screenshot tutorials as we have been doing? Please let us know!

A lamp made out of plastic drinking cups. That goes straight into the: why didn't I think of that file.

We've all wanted to live in cargo containers, now we have a handy resource telling us how to design and build our very own cargo container homes.

Another installment in my "I love LED lights" series: easy to make temporary LED garden lights. Take twenty minutes do do this for your next garden party or bar b q and you'll be the envy of all your friends. Making does not get any easier than this.

There has been a lot of hype lately about Banksy and street art. This to me is a simply stunning work that although it is decidedly contemporary in its' social commentary proves that there is real substance to the street art hype. I think I can hear a collective sigh of relief from all the hedge fund managers collecting street art. Or was it the last vestiges of that pretentious sentence rushing out of me?

The thumbnail above by the way leads to a hilarious picture that you too can take if you're in Barcelona(last time I checked anyway). To me it has a much more left leaning and anti-establishment feel than most of the contemporary street art stuff. Could it be that street art went from being something practiced by rebels who positioned themselves against society to court jesters who ridicule it from within?

A slideshow of Santiago Calatrava buildings on the New Yorker site. Is he getting boring or is it just me?

Sculpture based on graphs. For example: "Consumer Confidence, 2006-07, brass, wood." A cute intersection of art and statistics via Gulfstream. 

A public sculpture slideshow showing some nice work by Koons and Anish Kapoor on the NY Times site.

At Shapeways we have quite a few community members working on printing out their avatars. Artist Marc Owens ups the ante by making a life sized avatar-like suit. The suit was initiated because of this fun statistic, "54 percent of all males and 68 percent of all females "gender swap"--or create online personas of their opposite sex." This suit will allow you to do this in real life. Marc Owens does lots of other interesting stuff on the cusp of virtual worlds and art and he's a sure-fire guy to watch.

We're thrilled by all the people that are trying out our Creator. Just in case you missed our launch of it: the Creator is a tool that lets people without 3D modeling experience customize and create designs. Using the Creator you can make a unique and personal object within two minutes.  You can check out the movie here.

The first design that people can customize is the LightPoem. Most of the people that have made their own LightPoem either write inspirational sayings or something romantic as a gift for someone else. If you want to read a light poem by the way, the easiest way is to click "view in 3D" and then slowly turn it on its' axis. You have to log in first before doing this. What really caught us by surprise is the sheer variation in LightPoem designs. People really seem to be experimenting with painting using words. We're really excited by this and can't wait to see what you guys will do with them in the future! 

A while ago Jochem our CMO was playing with one of our Monkey Babies. They're the cute little models that we use to help you compare our materials. During Jochem's playing/testing of this particular money, he broke off its' tail. This was both sad and really fitting.

The Long Tail has gone from a little idea published by Chris Anderson to a huge one that determines a lot of corporate strategy and business thinking nowadays. There are a lot of businesses springing up operating in the Long Tail. They are not going for blockbuster hits but rather lots of small successes with niche products for small groups of customers.

At Shapeways we allow people to upload or modify any design and then have it 3D printed. A lot of people might think of us as a typical Long Tail business. Potentially however we are actually a non-tail business. Since every design on our site is unique and made by one single individual for themselves or as a gift for someone else, typically we sell just one printed out copy of each design.

Of course crowds bring crowd-like behavior and in future some of our designs will become popular. For now however the blockbusters are things like earrings or bookends where people print two copies of the design. In the future there might be a lot of businesses out there where every product has a market of one.

I believe that for cultural products such as movies and books the blockbuster model coupled with the Long Tail will be prevalent. But, in the world of manufactured consumer goods will a market of one not make more sense?