Mitchell Jetten is a great guy and despite his young age is a successful Shop owner on Shapeways. Jettuh as he is known on here, exclusively models Dutch model trains & model train accessories for his SpoorObjecten Shop on Shapeways. Despite asking for very low mark up per model sold Mitchell has made over $4000 with us so far. He is an enthusiastic & very helpful community member and it has been a pleasure to see him prosper. Indeed my "power lunch" with Mitchell in Amsterdam on a sunny Gustavmahlerplein surrounded by basking bankers was not only thoroughly enjoyable but also a professional high point for me. Mitchell is on the right in the foto below next to his good friend Niels.

Joris Peels: What modeling software do you use? And how long have you used it?

Mitchell Jetten: In general I only use 3ds Max for my trains. At school I learned how to use SolidWorks, and for the company I work for (freelance) I also sometimes use Autocad 2000 for CNC projects. Funny thing is, I started using Gmax (a free version of 3ds Max) in 2004, but I couldn't make more then a station platform with a texture on it back then. But when I discovered this great place where you can 3D print your objects, I started doing research about how I would have to build it, and what I could build with it (because, who wants an expensive easy station platform?). This happened in February 2009, a month later I finally had my first model in my hand, a Dutch small train signal So, to get back to the question, I've only known how to 3D model for a year and a half right now.

Joris Peels: How old are you?

Mitchell Jetten: I think I'm one of the youngest shop owners on Shapeways, I just turned 19 on the 7th of June.

Joris Peels: How did you happen to find Shapeways? 

Mitchell Jetten: If I remember correctly I heard something from my dad about 3D printing, and I thought he was nuts. I think I reacted the same as all people do that haven't heard about 3D printing........"What, you make a 3D picture,, and you print it on a standard printer?" Only after a month or so, I had nothing to do on school and found a Shapeways clip on Youtube a and this made me interested!

Joris Peels: What do you make?

Mitchell Jetten: I make Dutch model trains in the scale 1:160 (N Spoor) and my next step is to try making an affordable train in 1:87 (H0)! So for this moment just trains and scenery for model railways.

Joris Peels: How is your Shop doing?  

Mitchell Jetten: My shop is doing really great, seriously, thanks to Shapeways I met my girlfriend in some sort of way. Because of the earnings I made with Shapeways, I had enough money to fly to Munich with a few friends. Over there I met my girlfriend that weekend! I will fly to Munich again next month thanks to my Shapeways earnings! I eventually see myself getting rich with Shapeways' service.

Joris Peels: What is your most successful product?

Mitchell Jetten: To be honest i don't really know! At the moment the VIRM 9500 part 1/3 and VIRM 9500 2/3 are sold the most but that is also the first model I created so it has been online for a longer time. 

I think most people want it, because it's a very common train in the Netherlands.

 
The SGM(Sprinter) is also sold a lot, and there are about 5 persons (that I know of), that have finished it, and have a working model up and running!

Joris Peels: How do you see it in the future?

Mitchell Jetten: Ok, just a small sneak peak of my thoughts: In the future, I see myself building my next train...wait I'm doing that already... but not printing it in White, Strong & Flexible, but in a perfect and smooth material (like Envisiontec Perfactory). After the print I will cast it with resin, and make about 10 of those trains (not just the body, but the entire train completely finished).

Mitchell Jetten: There are 2 forums where I promote my trains, well not really promoting, but i do show the pictures of the model, and show them where they can buy it if they like, but it's not that I do a lot of promotion for my models. Also I've been to several model railway exhibitions to sell trains and also just to inform people about this amazing Shapeways website! Maybe I need to promote myself better, but i don't have a lot of time lately because of school!

Joris Peels: Do you do market research?

Mitchell Jetten: Not really, I think that's just 10% of the reason why I created the trains I have finished.
I just build them because I like those trains. And if people like them to, then that's a big plus.
A lot of people want me to build old trains, but to be honest, I don't feel a lot for old trains, I like modern stuff!

Joris Peels: Why trains? 

Mitchell Jetten: Because I like trains, I never had a working model railway in my room, but I do have Dutch trains in my room. So by making my own trains I feel special, because not a lot of people own the trains I've made!
 
Funny thing people ask me is:
Why 1:160? Most people use 1:87!
 
The answer to that is:
In 1:87 almost all trains I like have already been made and sold by the big companies, so it's useless to sell an unfinished train, if they can already buy a good finished train, right? In 1:160 there aren't a lot of Dutch trains, also because of the small scale, it's a lot cheaper to print those trains.

Joris Peels: Is Shapeways a job for you? 

Mitchell Jetten: In some sort of way you can say that Shapeways helped me making my dream come through. I always liked to make 3D models, but i never knew how to do it. (Yes I knew how to make a station platform, but that's easy) Since Shapeways I've learned a lot about how to 3D model an object. So now I do freelance work for a company, making 3D models for them. But I also have my own company (SpoorObjecten) because of what shapeways does! So, yes, i think it's a job for me, maybe not 100% yet, but give it some time...

Everbody, keep up the good work with your models!
 
@Shapeways, thank you so much for the wonderful website! Without Shapeways I wouldn't have been to Munich.......

Designer Banlu Kemiyatorn has a lot of great designs in his Shop. My personal favorites are his Bracelets. Each of them is a co-creator and you can customize the inner diameter of the bracelet. Bracelet Number 6 looks very modern to me.  I also love Bracelet Number 9 and the mega spiky Bracelet Number 3.  They're high tech without being cold, if that makes sense.

This steel 3D print can be attached to the standard gear shift knob in many models of BMW. You can Co-Create by uploading any image of your liking, a logo, some initials whatever you want and then for $40 we will ship a customized gear shift insert to you for you to install. For a few days you can even still get it in gold. Any guarantees on our part however do not extend into the realm of taste.The one on the left below by the way is manually polished. What do you guys think of that finish? The one on the right is for Arno and in the logo of his four man racing team.

This gear shifter is a product. And you could buy it. But, more importantly it is a bit of inspiration. Right now we have a steadily growing number of Co-Creators on Shapeways, 450 or so. A lot of these focus on jewelry, accessories and interior decoration items. But, there is a lot more in the world you could "custom fit" to people's liking. We hope that this inspires you guys to think outside that dastardly box, the home!

In cars for example you can see the enthusiasm Jay Leno has shown for replacing automobile parts. The car aftermarket/turning/customization industry is a $31 billion a year industry in the US alone. There are millions of car nuts like Arno, Peter and Robert. They all love their cars and many of them would like to improve them or personalize them in some way. Ultimately of course the car manufacturers themselves will be using design tools and 3D printing production equipment to give you customization options from the get go. Indeed the sheer volume of choice in car accessories and models has been accelerating. Right now the first 3D printing techniques are already used in very high end automobiles and in Formula 1 and we can 3D print metal parts of up to 1 meter so, money no object we could 3D print your entire car. In time costs will be lowered for this to become more and more accessible. But, as we've shown with the gear shifter there is a lot of opportunity to make less expensive things, today. So what are affordable designs that people can customize in order to personalize their iron steed right now?

Sadly Bart can not make it today so we will move the Shapeways Live to another day. We will keep you posted!

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen make up Belgian design studio Unfold. In addition to teaching at St. Lukas in Brussels they are also the most interesting designers working in 3D printing today. From their curating of Bits 'n Pieces in New York to their pioneering work on inventing their very own ceramic 3D printing process using a RepRap derived 3D printer to their latest fantastic work: a virtual pottery wheel, Unfold leads the way in design and 3D printing.  

Joris Peels: What is Unfold exactly?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Unfold is a design studio and a platform for everything we do. We have a strong multidisciplinary background in design, technology and art. Our focus is on spatial design, products, computation and production methods, and design theory. 

Joris Peels: Who is Unfold?

Unfold is Dries Verbruggen and Claire Warnier and we work frequently with a vast network of kindred spirits and specialists. 

Joris Peels: Why does Unfold like 3D printing?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Because it opens a lot of opportunities concerning the production and distribution of artifacts. It introduces new form languages and is a bridge between the virtual/digital and the material/tactile world. The edge between those two is blurring and 3d printing is one of the tools that aids removing that distinction. 

Joris Peels: Do you design everything with 3D modeling?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Not at all! We always use a mix of techniques that suit our purpose whether they are analog, digital or anything in between. We are not interested in committing to one kind of toolset. 

Joris Peels: What software do you use? 

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Depends on what we need for a certain project. When you consider software as toolkits with a certain range of tools in them, we use some tools from various toolkits and we often switch between them. For example for the Brainwave sofa we used BioExplorer to visualize the EEG data in 3d waveforms, 3D Ripper DX to extract the 3d data, Cinema4d to model the meshes and create visualizations of the complete sofa, Pepakura to unfold the meshes into textile patterns (not used) and finally Rhino to convert the mesh into nurbs for milling the foam. For 3d printing we use Netfabb, Meshlab, Pleasant3d and Skeinforge. Since L'Artisan Electronique we started developing our own experimental software with code-electro-typeface-pencil wizard Tim Knapen of The Indianen. LaserClay 1.0, the software used for the virtual throwing wheel is the first result and there's more to follow hopefully. 

Joris Peels: Normally designers just make things, why do you want to play with the process?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: It is important that you know and explore the tools you work with. Artisans used to start with making their own tools, before they even could consider to make an object. In this digital era, designers are not aware of the tools they use and the limited set they are working with. Unfold likes to put some time in making and understanding the tools they use, so that they can adapt these tools to their needs and design new tools. New tools lead to new form languages and in the end to new designs. 

Joris Peels: How does your ceramic 3D printing process work?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: It uses a normal Reprap, a Rapman from Bits from Bytes with an adapted toolhead based on the Frostruder design by Makerbot. A pressurized syringe is filled with clay and objects are drawn layer by layer with a coil of slowly extruded clay. The system is simple but you need to trow together knowledge about ceramics and 3d printing to get it to work. 

Joris Peels: How did you come up with it?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: It just came together one day when we saw the first hackable open source 3d printers online. At that time we were also working a lot with ceramics and found it particularly interesting because the printing process that uses extruded ABS filament resembles somehow the coiling technique used in ceramics. We were fascinated by the reprap tool, but we didn't like the standard material it uses. Ceramic is a very delicate and valuable material, plastic isn't. It doesn't mean you cant make a valuable item from plastics or cheap stuff with ceramics but people have a different emotional connection to both materials. To use ceramic together with 3D-printing, offers us to make products to which people relate more and have a higher perceived value. Hopefully those objects will last longer and won't end up as fast on on landfill as plastic objects. 

Joris Peels: What 3D printers/processes do you play with? 

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: For example L’Artisan Electronique is an installation that was first exhibited in the Design by Performance show in Z33, Hasselt. Unfold created -aside from the ceramic printer- some kind of a virtual pottery wheel in collaboration with the previously mentioned Tim Knapen. This pottery wheel gives visitors a chance to ‘turn’ their own forms. At regular intervals, a selection of these designs is printed in clay and exhibited in the space. We wanted to add an input method for the printer that felt like a natural user interface for creating digital pottery, making it a start to end process. As to other 3d print processes, there is much experimentation left in our Rapman machine so we'll continue with that, testing various other materials like glass and building new toolheads. One day we might dive into some of the fascinating open source printer designs that use a bed of powdered material and see what we can do with that and we still use commercial services to print prototypes and moulds in various techniques. We also love the laser cutter at Sint-Lukas Brussels, the University College we both teach at. Unfold just finished a project in which we laser cut ceramic green sheets (an unfired ceramic material in sheet form) which is pretty interesting to explore further. From time to time we also pick up the unfolding technique from which we took our name, like for example for the giant sleeping cat we did for the Habitat festival in Antwerp. 

Joris Peels: Why did you choose the Utah teapot for a design?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: The Utah teapot is a 3D model created in 1975 by Martin Newell which has become a standard reference object in the computer graphics community. It is a simple, round, partially concave mathematical model of an ordinary teapot. Since its inception it has been re-used millions of times, starring for example in Toy Story and The Simpsons. The objective of Utanalog by Unfold was to return the iconographic teapot to its roots as a piece of functional dish-ware while showing its status as an icon of the digital world and showing the traces of a 34 year long digital life. The Utah is a very iconic model and a lot of people recognize it but don't know the story behind it, and besides that its just a good looking teapot! 

Joris Peels: What is a Brainwave sofa?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: The design of the Brain Wave Sofa is the result of a brain wave scan measured by means of an elektro-encefalogram (EEG) using a set of electrodes connected to the head. The data is represented as a 3d landscape by a computer application for neurofeedback, the depth is the frequency of the brain-activity in hertz, the height is the strength of the signal and the length is the timescale. The role of the 'designer' is challenged in this procedure, by looking at the 3d visuals you are directly influencing your design. In this case Lucas Maassen controlled the form by opening and closing his eyes while measuring a specific wavelength known as the Alpha activity (8-12 Hertz). The Alpha activity is peculiar because it strengthens when you close your eyes in contrast to other brain activity that dims. This to prepare your brain for the large input of signals when you open your eyes. The resulting 3 second computer file is sent to a CNC milling machine that mills out the Brainwave in soft foam. It is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a futuristic production workflow in which the designer only has to close his eyes and a computer 'prints' the result out as a functional form. A warm grey felt with buttons in the valleys is applied by hand to the foam honoring the traditional codes of a sofa. 

Joris Peels: Do you have tips for designers who are starting out?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Keep on doing the things you love to do and don't worry too much about the industry and getting things into production. There are so many ways to produce your own objects these days, that you don't necessarily need to find a label or a producer to make nice objects which you can sell as well. Make good work - document your work online - make more good work etc 

Joris Peels: Do all designers secretly want to be artists?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: No, we think designers and artists both want to follow their dreams. Whether design is a subset of art or art a subset of design is something you can debate about forever but in the end it all boils down to the context in which you work and not so much the work in itself. 

Joris Peels: Would you rather have the bestselling item at IKEA or an exhibit at the Venice Biennale?

Claire Warnier and Dries Verbruggen: Both, it depends on the context and the questions that are asked. An exhibit with IKEA at the Venice Biennale maybe?

As you may know we use Objet 3D printers for our White, Transparent and Black Detail materials. These printers have two settings Top Quality and Top Speed. The difference between the two setting is in the layer thickness of the 3D print. Top Speed has a layer thickness of 28 micron and Top Quality has one of 16 micron. We always set them to Top Speed because this is faster and thus cheaper for you. A few weeks back we had a production hiccup. In response we printed a batch with the Top Quality setting and got several very enthusiastic responses. Because of this for the next two weeks, until the 15th, all orders of the Detail materials will be printed at the highest detail. There is no additional charge. 

The difference between the two settings is hard to see on photographs. Andy (Sadwargamer) says of the higher detail prints he received, "The new high quality white detail print mode almost completely removes the “stair effect” currently exhibited when using white detail – especially on curved surfaces. For small models even greater detail is now possible – opening up further avenues for modelers.  In particular it reduces the amount of post production work needed to take the printed model to a master production model for commercial sale as either a resin or white metal model."

The draw it contest was an especially difficult one to judge. After long debate we have decided that:

The fifth place winner is fx2's Shark Stainless Steel letter opener.We thought this was a fun product to customize and use.

In fourth place we have YouKnowWho4Eva's cute MiBuddy Iphone Stand.We thought that this was a great way to both customize and "anthropomorphize" the Iphone stand.

In third place we have Jeff's Canvas Ipad Wrap. We thought this was a well presented and well thought out fun co-creator drawing product.

In second place we have WelshDesigns' Draw your own Stick Family. This seemed to us to be a lot of fun and an original idea to make such a "literal" product with people's drawing skill.

In first place we have Lensman's Breast Plate.We loved the breast plate jewelry idea and thought this would be a great product to customize.