Christmas is coming

Can you design the most christmassy model: perhaps an ornament to go in a tree, a 3D printed stocking, a personal touch for your living room, anything really, as long as it brings Christmas cheer.

To participate, upload a model and add the tag christmas to it.

The winner will win:

The song White Christmas by Bing Crosby from Itunes.

Christmas Set of 20 Folding Gift Boxes!!!

A Christmas Carol (Ultimate Collector's Edition)

Blizzard Bucket Snow in Seconds

and

$250 in 3D printing!

Submission deadline: 30th of November, Winner announced 1st of December. Some have asked so we shall give: Shapeways staff will judge this contest. The winner will be determined to be: that model that can give the most Christmas cheer to the most people.

Image credit: Creative Commons: Attribution, Fabio Luiz Santos.  

Did you think that you were done with voting? Vote now for our Does your Character have Character contest. The winner will be announced on the 14th.

I know that previously we said that the contest would be over by now but AWN and we decided to extend it to give people more time to submit their models. I should have posted this earlier but was sick, sorry. So run over to our contest gallery and vote now!

Thomas Linssen of StudioThol designed a full sized 3D printed chair for Dutch Design Week and we were proud to have on the stand. The Hypernurbs chair was so inviting that despite the do not touch signs people couldn't keep their hands off of it. Some of the 3D printing astute will note that the chair could not be produced in one piece. This is true, currently the build envelopes of 3D printing machines make printing a chair impossible. Thomas therefore printed out his chair in parts and then glued it together after. Unlike the other items on the stand Hypernurbs is not a final product. Thomas is looking to have it produced in bronze right now. Be sure to check out his site and the great kitchen on the index page. His cocktail glass is another strong piece of design. As are his childrens kitchen appliances including this canon that cuts fruit.

We're in a rather strange building here on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. The ancient building we are in has two large open atrium-like areas in it. During the day they are unused. In the evening hours though these areas often surprise us. I've walked for coffee to find a usually empty atrium transformed into a full table tennis competition complete with official tables, referees and onlookers. It is also really weird to walk around your office building and suddly realise that you are one of the few people not wearing a judo outfit because the classes just started. I know not to work too late on a Tuesday because then the Philips Harmonie Orchestra practice tends to shatter any productivity gains. 

One of the neighbors that I was the most curious about was the Philips RoboCup team. They are a group of 15 enthusiasts, here every Wednesday night, that get together to enter into competitions revolving around autonomous robotic football players. They write the code, the algorithms and hack the hardware so that their team of autonomous soccer robots will beat out teams from all over the world in competitions. 

This is why in the middle of this atrium next door to our offices there is a RoboCup football pitch. The pitch itself rather confused me on my first visit but it has always intrigued me also. So, today I went over to shoot some pictures and talk to the guys on the team.The robots have very little in the way of processing power and come with a modem. But, they only use this modem to upload and download software to them and to communicate with the other robots on their team. The robots tell each other where they are on the field, where the ball is and how close they are to the ball. An individual robot can then "claim" the ball to make the ball if it is the closest to it and tell the others that it will go for the ball. Some robots are assigned defensive or offensive roles and there is a goalie also.

The robots use a camera pointed at a mirror to see the area around them, one processor handles the video the other movement. The processor that they use to determine where the robot should move has around a 100 MIPS of power. 100 MIPS(Millions of Instructions Per Second) is comparable to the power present in a 90 Megahertz Pentium processor. This was the power of a regular desktop PC, in 1994. If you do not know what Pentium means, think slow, think Windows 95, think Forrest Gump tops the box office. The power that you used to play Colonization in 1994 is now used to move a robot autonomously around a football pitch. You are currently viewing this blog on a PC that probably has 2.4 gigahertz. Although I can't be sure because gigahertz used to mean something and now it doesn't.

The goal of all the RoboCup players is to make machines that are capable of taking on and winning from human soccer players. While at the moment our RoboCup players might look kind of cute and goofy, beware! I've read a lot of Isaac Asimov and can tell you that robots and humans never end up getting along.

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.