Inspired by our meetup at MAD yesterday, I walked around the museum admiring the incredible art and products that have been made possible through digital manufacturing techniques.
Besides art, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the other cool 3D printing innovations in recent history.
Lets call it a Future Flashback Friday Finds…
Just as bustling cities attract people, underwater, coral reefs attract sea life. On Bahrain’s coast, like many others in the world, overfishing has had a major impact on the health of marine life. Reef Arabia, a team of artificial reef designers, turned to 3D printed sandstone to create custom structures to submerge: “With 3D printing we can get closer to natural design because of its ability to produce very organic shapes and almost lay down material similar to how nature does it.”
Wade has brittle bone disease, meaning that even the slightest injury can easily break his bones. Because of this, he doesn’t get to participate in many physical activities. Instead, Wade turns to video games to live out vicarious adventures. Wade’s wish was to see how games were made and to become a character in a videogame. Robot Games invited Wade to their studios where he got to be a games developer for a day, he even got to make himself into a character…and we 3D printed it for him at Shapeways.
From bespoke prosthetics, organ printing and a father-son moment, 3D printing has enabled people to make truly tailored prosthetics and medical advances, even at the grassroots level. As this incredible story from our friends at MakeBot shows, people are harnessing the power of 3D printing in their homes to solve their specific problems.
Everyday at Shapeways I’m amazed by what people are inspired to create. We each have specific needs, and everyday it seems more likely that 3D printing may well hold our solutions…
What will you create this weekend?
Just love playing devil’s advocate:
3D will make Canada and Australia super rich. No matter how large or smaller orders are for goods. nothing happens without the raw resource(s), something these countries have in huge abundance.
Unfortunately, 3D cannot manufacture water, the generally speaking worldwide resource that is increasingly scarce and that world wars will be fought over this century, perhaps beginning as soon as a decade from now.
And those world wars will use new and powerful 3D weaponry of almost unimaginable destructive ability, created at will and used as fast as it is manufactured — within minutes.
Then there’s lethal pandemics, speeded by 3D wars, and Climate Change that is further accelerated by these wars, all of which could cull our global population to a small and manageable level, whatever that means, and cause the survivors to collectively say “enough is enough” and work as a collective to save what is left and perhaps even reverse a small proportion of the damage.
So there you have it — the future in a nutshell, emphasis on what many of you will say “nut”.