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

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?  

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.

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.

I must admit to not knowing what a brailler was before reading the Dexigner article. A brailler is a device that blind people can use to type in braille. An iconic and ancient one has recently be redesigned and I think it looks very robust and usuble. It also looks very friendly. It still amazes me how people can design a functional object that looks friendly.     

             

A decidedly unfriendly object is James McAdam's Safe Bedside Table, a small table that doubles as a club and shield to defend yourself. 

Some people say that 3D printing is like 'growing' objects. I would dispute this, Tokujin Yushioka, he grows things. He grew a chair consisting of crystals. The production process seems to be a bit slow for Shapeways but we should consider it.