This week's Designer Spotlight focuses on the innovative ways people are using Kickstarter and Shapeways to fund and realize their creative projects. On demand 3D printing makes it possible for artists and designers to realize their ideas, and platforms like Shapeways and Kickstarter make it possible to reach a massive audience with no financial investment or risk. It's inspiring and easy to get started!

There are three main ways that Shapeways can help your Kickstarter project: to create the prototype, create the final product, or, easiest of all, to create the rewards for your backers.

The huge advantage of 3D printing is how cost effective it is to have a quantity of one manufactured. This makes it an ideal technology for quickly prototyping ideas.  Within 10 days you'll be holding your sketch in your hands and you can test it out in the real world. Claire Delaunay used this to develop Botiful, a telepresence robot for consumers and a very cute way to use Skype!

Speaking to someone by Skype from your phone can be a bit awkward at times, with person on the other end often seeing only half your face or a closeup of your earlobe.Enter Botiful. She raised over $90,000 on Kickstarter and has racked up some support by others who are hoping for more natural remote conversations, including TechCrunch and Skype's former Chief Architect Ahti Heinla. One thing to note is that Kickstarter does not allow photos of renders in their projects, so be sure to print a physical copy of your prototype and photograph that to include in your project description.

The guys from Studio Neat have become the poster boys for success on Kickstarter with the Glif, an iPhone tripod connector which raised over $137,000 when seeking $10,000. They used Shapeways first to prototype their design, and then as the final product, when they offered it as one of the reward tiers. Backers could get a Shapeways made pre-order Glif to use right away, before the injection-molded final product was ready.

They shared their secrets to successful  Kickstarter campaign using Shapeways in this great post, discussing prototyping and manufacturing with Shapeways, their tips on a great Kickstarter video (shots!) and getting the word out about your project by finding appropriate bloggers for your design.

There have been many examples of successful Kickstarter campaigns using Shapeways, the most notable being Joshua Harker's Crania Anatomica, which became Kickstarters #1 most funded sculpture project of all time! 

Joshua wanted to raise $500 to exhibit his newest sculpture via Kickstarter before it went the traditional gallery route. He offered the sculpture as a reward for backers, so anyone who pledged $25 or more got their very own 3D printed skull. The response was astounding, and the money he raised means he is able to continue to pursue his career as an artist. He's making a new project now, you can hear all about it and his experience using Shapeways and Kickstarter in this interview.

The easiest thing about making your rewards with Shapeways is you can wait until the end of your funding cycle, and then place an order for exactly the amount of rewards you need. So even if your project wildly exceeds your expectations, you are not suddenly faced with hand-making 1200 individual rewards!

More examples from the Shapeways community include the MeshUp and Iconic.am. Have you launched a Kickstarter project using Shapeways? Share your Kickstarter + Shapeways project with us!

Tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? Where are you located?

Chris Schmidt and Megan Ender are Seedling Design. We have created jewelry and art for over 10 years and currently work out of our home studio in Oakland, CA. By day Chris is an industrial designer and invents toys for companies such as Mattel, Hasbro, Fisher-Price, MGA and LeapFrog. Megan has a career in non-profit work and art education. We design bold and unique pieces that attract attention and our wish is that you enjoy, get complimented and feel especially delightful wearing our products! 

What's the story behind your designs? What inspires you? 

Seedling Design stems from the concept of taking a seed of an idea and seeing how we can transform it into something magical. Some concepts we’ve started off with are: Imaginary rock collections, magnetic sculptures, food as jewelry, cool geometry, tensegrity, planet inspired jewelry, self-defense rings, what would our favorite artist’s jewelry look like, textiles with 3D printing, and other mixed media pieces. Inspiration comes from our everyday lives, our childhoods, nature and our interest in geometry, science and technology. We have a list of 200 ideas that keeps growing, including ideas such as how to bring back pop-beads for kids in a modern form.  

What brought you to 3D printing with Shapeways?

In working in the design field for 15 years, Chris has seen the growth of 3D printing and was excited to use the technology. At work Chris uses an FDM (fused deposition modeling) printer all the time, but the output is less than attractive. Any other technology was always too expensive up until we discovered Shapeways. Now we can experiment all we want at a minimal cost.

How do you promote your work?

Since we are just starting out as a part-time, just for fun company, we’re only in the beginning phases of promoting our work. We started on Etsy and we are experimenting selling our work in several local Oakland shops. Since we both have fulltime jobs, getting ourselves out there has been a slow but informative process and we hope to keep expanding our audience.  

Who are your favorite designers or artists? Who in the Shapeways community has served as an inspiration to you? 

Our favorite artists and designers include: Tara Donovan, Gaudi, Anish Kapoor, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, Herbert Bayer, Louise Nevelson, Olafur Eliasson, Barbara Hepworth, Gabriel Orozco, Ai Weiwei, Shepard Fairey, Eva Hess and probably 50 more. As far as 3D printing artists, we’ve always liked the work of Nervous System and Bathsheba.

Everything! Clothing, architecture, toys, but probably not food since we love our California produce

Check out their colorful designs on their Shapeways shop or their website.

Want to be our next featured designer? Send me an email at natalia@shapeways.com.

This week's Designer Spotlight focuses on Bo Lorentzen, a photographer whose creative upbringing has led him to create custom mounts and accessories for the popular GoPro camera.

Tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? Where are you located?

I am Bo, originally from Denmark, now living and working in Hollywood, California. My background is photography and graphic design.

What's the story behind your designs? What inspires you to design for the GoPro?

My designs are mostly created to solve my own needs and wants.  The GoPro for me is a amazing camera, which truly shows how scale and technology affect how we do things, because it creates images with quality better than my broadcast cameras of years ago.

Shapeways is an absolutely fantastic concept, I was printing parts for customers myself on my UP! printer, constantly having to check on prints and files,  using Shapeways is the only logical way to do this,  I upload a file and let Shapeways deal with fulfilling orders. It is brilliant! (Ed-thanks, we think so too!)

I did actually take classes in 3D animation in the nineties, but 3D product design is something I have slowly figured out the hard way. I probably learned to think in 3D from my mother who is very artistic and "forced" us as kids to draw, to work in clay, and generally hammer together and build whatever we were thinking. So when we saw a TV program about pirates, we would later be building a pirate ship in the backyard.

How do you promote your work?

I don't really promote like I should,  most of my sales are from word of mouth, from happy customers using my designs. I write a blog, where I share my thoughts about photography.

EVERYBODY, the Shapeways community is truly amazing and one of a kind, there are so many creative people using technology to make hard-copies of their imaginative concepts. To mention one maybe Theo Jansen's amazing moving sculptures might be one, I look at those weekly.

I am very excited about printing with multiple materials in one project in the future.

GoPro fan? Check out Bo's camera accessories in his Shapeways Shop, or explore the range of GoPro add-ons that people are creating.

This weeks Designer Spotlight focuses on Remi van Oers, a Dutch designer interested in using 3D printing to solve problems in beautiful, functional ways.

I'm a young enthusiastic designer, 26 years old, interested in culture, people, art, architecture & design. I studied at the Dutch Design Academy, and now run my own design company located in a former Philips factory in Eindhoven, a city that breathes creativity and innovation.

What's the story behind your designs? What inspires you?

That's a good question. I'm interested in people, and how to improve their daily lives. The longer I work in the design profession, the harder it seems for me to define the profession, and the word! I feel that the word design is misused, design is not about styling or decoration, it's about solving problems in useful thoughtful ways. In my opinion it should serve people, as good design helps people move forward, in every possible way.  To answer the question; I think I'm inspired by problems and thoughtless solutions. I'm inspired by the opportunity to solve them in an innovative and user friendly way.

The products in my Shapeways shop, are basically products I needed myself. I couldn't buy them anywhere so I decided to design them myself. While enjoying the results I thought more people could benefit the solutions and I decided to make my designs available to everyone. That turned out to be a good idea. People where having the same problems and suddenly I was selling thoughful solutions. This was especially visible by the product Clip-it, a simple clip to convert your iPhone charger to a travel dock. The phone is somehow designed to have a flat battery within a day, so designing an easy charging solution made sense and turned out to be something people wanted worldwide.

In 2002 I started as a student of architecture, and there I was first exposed to Computer Aided Design. I hated it for exactly two weeks, after that the teacher showed me what was going to be possible with CAD and 3D design. It was like seeing the light, I instantly knew that this was going to be the future. From there on, I overloaded my teacher with tons of questions every week, about how to draw specific forms. Luckily, the teacher was a master, he could see from a distance when my lines were not straight. 3D printing was still in its infancy but we used the CAD programs to turn idea sketches into technical drawings and realistic renders. Later during my study as a product designer I dived into the process of turning ideas into test models by using Rapid Prototyping, the start of learning Rapid Manufacturing, currently called 3D Printing.

I don't do much promotion actually. I discovered that if you make nice products and bring them to notice to people, they will spread the word for you because they like it. That works better than me telling how much I like it myself. I think products that have a reason for being will get discovered, first by a small group and then suddenly get discovered by a lot of people. It did help a lot that some blogs wrote about the products I designed, as the products tell a certain story, the bloggers understand that story and they love to share it with their own words.

I trust, that soon, we won't be so limited anymore. So people are probably naming big things here. But I believe you should never think from the medium as a starting point, or in this case the production method. It limits you then already because you think about a specific process. It's more interesting to just dream up what you want. What you want may often seem impossible, but by keeping in mind the idea you will notice that with passion you are able to push boundaries. Suddenly you are doing what seemed to be impossible before and are then pushing the boundaries of machining and production. I also think you should use 3D printing process for parts we are not able to make yet with current production technologies. So I'm not necessarily thinking in bigger parts that could be used to build homes. I'm thinking smaller parts here, very detailed, fully assembled in multi materials. I would love to design and realize the next super phone with one shot 3D printing through the upcoming technologies, but would also love to see people developing human organs with it to save peoples lives.

As a designer I believe in innovation, I believe in people and their will to improve and evolve. 3D printing and other new technologies are embracing these thoughts and therefore soon will change industrial production, change consumer behaviour, change the economic frame, test and change the rules of intellectual  property, change the way companies realize and deliver products. And eventually it will change the way we look at products. I'm positive about the future!

Check out Remi's beautiful products for your iPhone on his Shapeways Shop, his website, and stay up to date with his designs via Twitter.