Bart and I had some fun painting some of our models with arcylic paint. You can use arcylics to paint White, Strong & Flexible and we wanted to show you guys that. For the both of us the last painting training & practice we ever did before making this video was in kindergarten. But, we can not wait to see what you guys will do with paint & Shapeways

Bvicarious also known as Bryan Vaccaro has two Youtube movies online where he tests our White, Strong & Flexible material.  He bends and manhandles a small piece to show you the material properties. We think that this is great and it should be really helpful in showing you what our materials can do. 

The material White, Strong & Flexible is made by SLS(Selective Laser Sintering)on an EOS Formiga P 100. The official name of the material itself is Fine Polyamide PA 2200. If you are familiar with SLS parts and think that they are brittle, weak and don't look good then you probably have seen other materials made on other machines. I know I'm tooting our own horn since we have an EOS Formiga but this stuff looks amazing compared to all the other types of SLS out there. If anyone is on the market for an SLS machine, you simply have to pick EOS. And once you've seen Bryan's videos I think you can see why we named the material White, Strong & Flexible.    

So, I was at Dutch Design Week and I'm looking around and thinking about all the awesome stuff there: the design-y chairs, pretty frames, beautiful book cases etc. And out of all those things I fall in love with one item. This item is a six foot bright green foam filled dolphin made by Geboren im Wald.   

After the design week was over I bought it. It is cuddly, soft and you can lie on it and I just think its a lot of fun. I do admit that it was a bit of an impulse buy and that it is not a very standard furntiture item.The net result is that I now have a unique design item and that my mom and girlfriend think I'm nuts.

Apart from the whacky and loveable appearance of the thing I really enjoy the concept of it. It is an indoor version of a common inflatable pool toy. Another piece by Geboren im Wald is "the island"(pictured below) which you might recognize as resembling quite closely the largest of these toys. So the deisgner took something standard and cheap that is for the outdoor use by playing children and turned it into something made for living rooms and grownups. Although some feel, incorrectly, that this purchase disqualifies me from belonging to this category.   

Wouter Scheublin was one of the designers on the Virtual Making stand at Dutch Design Week. He became interested in the mechanical possibilities that 3D printed models provide. He used the Selective Laser Sintering process and the Nylon 12 material(aka SLS, or White, Strong & Flexible as we call it at Shapeways) to print small working 3D printed cars. I do not want to be decieving here, these things are tiny, about 10cm by 10cm by 5cm. And they are not the get in and drive variety of car or the internal combustion engine type of car. But, I did not want to call them model or toy cars because this is clearly an experiment in design that goes much further than this.

You can see the working gears and the spring clearly. These mechanisms as well as the axles work as soon as the support material is removed. The mechanism is intentionally exposed so that people can see what you can design and build with 3D printing. The entire car comes out of the machine in one piece. The only exception is the rubber for the wheels which is made up of standard O rings. 

When you pull the car back over the ground the wheels wind the gears that in turn wind the spring and once you let go the car zooms over the floor. You like?  

On Sunday Mieke Kleppe came by to pick up her DDW Punnik2.0 Waistband. This design by Peter Hermans(her boyfriend) won our Dutch Design Week competition and was designed specifically for her. I love the way it looks and hope that it will get a lot of other Shapeways members to start thinking about 3D printed jewelry. We like the idea of something unique designed for that unique someone.

Look at the lamp to the left made by Geboren im Wald(born in the woods in German) it looks cute right something that you put on your bedside table perhaps. It was milled out of one solid piece of wood by a man using a water powered mill that is hundreds of years old. The man who milled it usually makes centerpieces for wooden spiral staircases. The lamp was finished by a high gloss paint that is very much in contrast to the wood it was made of. So far so good right.

Now look at the designer standing next to his lamp.

Niels Schuurmans, who is a really nice guy by the way, displayed his Balloon Furniture at his own stand at Dutch Design Week. It is the most fun furniture that I've seen in a while. It looks great and he is working on turning these demo models into an actual product. As soon as he has, I'm buying one. When is the last time you've seen a chair that can be described as hilarious? 

Peter van der Jagt made a wineglass doorbell for Droog Design at Dutch Design Week you could see the result on the more development stand. I'm pretty sure that it is actually supposed to hang upside down but I love the idea.

Design Drift is a design duo made up of Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta. They are part of Virtual Making together with Shapeways, TNO, 3D solutions and 4 other talented designers. 

Their Oillight is quite the statement. The lamp explores the scarcity of natural resources, fluctuating oil prices and consumer demand. There are several different oillights each made on a different day. Because of the differences in oil prices also affect prices for oil derivatives such as the plastics that are used for 3D printing the lamp becomes bigger or smaller on each different day depending on how high the oil price is on the day when it is ordered. 

Each little barrel represents $1 and so the entire lamp which is a cluster of them accurately represents the price of oil on that day. A series of oillights then make up the Oillight work which shows you the fluctuation in oil prices over a given period.

Something lovely I saw at Dutch Design Week was Mieke Meijer's Newspaperwood. NewspaperWood(or KrantHout in Dutch) is wood made from paper. 

The process of turning recycled newspapers into wood consists using a roller on the newspapers and using a special water soluble glue to bind them. The resulting NewspaperWood can be cut, milled, sanded and generally treated like any other type of wood. I'm fascinated by the idea of reversing a traditional production process: not from wood to paper but the other way around. I also like the way it looks. This just proves that recycling does not always have to produce ugly or boring materials. 

Mieke has already made special editions of the wood such panels from a specific date or region. At one point you might be able to get a kitchen table made of the sports pages, a chair made from newspapers from your birth year or a financial crisis headboard.    

Mieke, a Design Academy graduate, is currently working together with design label vij5 to develop NewsPaperwood. 

Arjan van Raadshooven of Vij5 told me that they are actively looking for other designers to come up with products made out of this innovative material.

At Dutch Design Week one of the talented designers that make up the Virtual Making exhibit is Alexander Pelikan, better known as PeliDesign. I first came across his Plastic Nature furtniture in a catalogue and immediately loved it. His chairs, stool and table combine resin with wood to create a natural with synthetic 'cyborg' that is just absolutely amazing. I know I tend to use a lot of exclamation marks in my posts and can at times seem overly enthusiastic but I simply love this furniture. The smoothness of the resin combined with the wood give the desings a unique feel. I also love the juxtaposition of a natural material with a man made one.

Peli initially came up with this design for his graduation project for the Design Academy in Eindhoven. It is no surprise then that he would now be interested in 3d Printing and rapid prototyping. For our Virtual Making Exhibit for Dutch Design Week this year he became inspired by, "A machine's perception."

With 3d scanning equipment and 3d printing he showed that machines do indeed percieve and are less perfect than we imagine them to be. He experimented with different resolutions and printed out the results. From very fine reproductions to low resolution models you can see how machines percieve and be entertained by interesting shapes that will seem cartoon-y at times as well as all to familiar to 3d modelers out there. 

Look at the difference in the above ashtrays from realistic to angular. Or the jars to the right that range from a close copy of the original to something out of Scanner Darkly.

I hope that Peli, at least for a while, sticks to 3d printing and can not wait to see the results.

As you might know Shapeways currently has an exhibit at Dutch Design Week.

We're a part of Virtual Making, a showcase of the possibilities of rapid manufacturing.TNO a dutch research institute that does a lot of research and consulting in 3d printing is one of our partners. Another partner is Free Form Fab, an initiative to create a fab lab in the cities of Eindhoven and Tilburg.

A fab lab is a place where people can come to in order to use machinery such as a lasercutters, CNC machines, milling machines and 3d printers to make their own inventions, creations and products(something that we definately are excited about at Shapeways!).

Yet another partner is Design Solutions, a Solidworks re-seller. Solidworks by the way is a great 3d design package that works well with Shapeways. Our other partners are the designers: Wouter Scheublin, Design Drift, Studio Thol, Kocx and Peli Design.

The virtual making stand is made up of large styrofoam blocks and houses a 3d printer, a lot of awesome designs and a bank of computers where lectures and workshops are given. 25,000 people came to Dutch Design Week last year and we're enjoying talking to all the visitors this year.

It is of course hard man a stand for a week for us but when talking to all the designers, students and other visitors out there it is definately worthwhile. We've really found that a lot of people love the idea of the Creator and hope to entice some very talented designers to come to Shapeways. 

A lot of people are amazed at how our Dutch Design Week contest winner Peter Hermans' Punnik 2.0 Waistband feels so organic and fabric-like. People also like a last minute adition to our stand, HeadSpace bowl. This design by Bryan Vaccaro was quite the challenge to print but the face within a bowl is arresting. We'll keep you updated on all the goings on! 

Whystler aka Shawn Johnson is one of the nicest and most helpful Shapeways members out there. Besides this he, makes his living selling virtual goods and is a dreamer, a designer, a potter, a musician, a festival organiser, a connaisseur of virtual worlds and a virtual architect and fashion designer. You can check out his work on IMVU here or check out his website, "the land of Whyst."

What software do you use to design?
 
I use mostly 3D Studio Max, and Flux Studio 2.0, but occasionally I will also use Wings3D, Milkshape, and Sketchup.  Most of my designing has been in virtual worlds, such as Activeworlds where I started, Adobe's now defunct Atmosphere, SecondLife, IMVU, Blink3D, and I'm just starting to design for Vivaty, which use's a version of Flux Studio as a builder.

How long have you been designing?
 
I've been designing all my life.  I remember, as a child, looking forward to vacations from school because I would have the time to make things from books I had taken out from the library ... popsicle stick cabins, pom pom creatures, bases for my star wars figures and micronaughts, houses for my plastic animals, puppets, go-carts, tree-houses, you name it
 
In terms of virtual design, I have been doing this since about 1990 when I discovered muds (or multi-user dungeons), which were entirely text based environments.  Using the code of various muds, I designed rooms and places, and even scripted objects that did cool things
 
3D digital art came into play as a medium around 1998/89 when I found Activeworlds and started making virtual worlds.  This was a big change for me.  I learned how to make 3D objects through writing rwx out by hand in notepad, specifying vertices and polygons in text.  And soon after, I started using 3D programs to make these objects, buildings, and places.  Soon after, Adobe launched their Atmosphere program, and I joined a vibrant community and was eventually hired to make content.  When Atmosphere faded and eventually lost support from Adobe, I had a great time designing in SecondLife back in the early days and also much later discovered IMVU, where I have focussed for a long time.
 
Since 1998 I have been a clay artist and potter.  Everything I make is hand-built (meaning I don't use a potters wheel), so even functional items are very sculptural.