Category Archives: Design
Happy Mother’s Day: 3D Printed Gifts for Mom
Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms out there! Here are our top picks for 3D printed gifts for Mom.
Our first pick (above) is a customized Appear lamp, featured by i.materialise ($107).
A nice gold-plated Mom pendant featured by Shapeways ($32.99).
#1 Mom pencil holder, featured by Thingiverse (free download).
Elephant Mother and Child, featured by Thingiverse (free download).
Mother statuette, featured by Shapeways ($3.47 and up).
And finally, a cute 3D printing video from MakerBot dedicated to Mom.
3D Printed Curves: How the N12 Bikini Fits Your Body Perfectly
We have seen 3D printing on the fashion runway before, but the N12 bikini from Continuum Fashion is bringing 3D printed fashion into the home.
Clothing-maker Continuum calls themselves “part fashion label, part experimental design lab,” combining emerging technology with high fashion.
In this case, Continuum’s designer Jenna Fizel wrote a program that generates a custom bikini swimsuit lattice pattern based on the contours of the customer’s body.
The N12 bikini is the world’s first ready-to-wear, completely 3D-printed article of clothing. All of the pieces, closures included, are made directly by 3D printing and snap together without any sewing. N12 represents the beginning of what is possible for the near future.
N12 is named for the material it’s made out of: Nylon 12. This solid nylon is created by the SLS 3D printing process. Shapeways calls this material “white, strong, and flexible”, because its strength allows it to bend without breaking when printed very thin. With a minimum wall thickness of .7 mm, it is possible to make working springs and almost thread-like connections. For a bikini, the nylon is beautifully functional because it is waterproof and remarkably comfortable when wet.
Watch the video below for details on how this bikini is custom designed and 3D printed.
Shapeways’ Friday Finds: 3D Design Showcase from the Shapeways Community
Looking for some unique and innovative examples of 3D printing? Check out Shapeways’ Friday Finds, a curated collection of designs from the Shapeways community. Pictured above is a Combo Razor Stand by Lightbringer, designed for safety and functionality.
Sharkfin Ring in Silver, by The Rogue and the Wolf
Concentric Cube by Oskar van Deventer
More from Shapeways blog.
Shapeways Feed is a Pinterest for 3D Printing Designs
3D printing marketplace and community Shapeways has launched a new website featured called Shapeways Feed. Simply put, it’s a real-time Pinterest for 3D printable designs. Or as Shapeways puts it: “Our newly launched Feed is the best way to discover all the cool stuff people are making!”
Beautiful feature, and very effective at showcasing how many new high-quality designs are being published every day.
I immediately found two designs that I thought were amazing.
This “I miss you!” bracelet has a jigsaw puzzle design with a piece missing, created by badulaques.
And this Nocturnal timepiece is a very old instrument for telling time at night by measuring the stars. While concept is ancient, this design is all original. It is fully functional (all dials move properly) and meant to be worn as a pendant. Created by Whystler.
Great addition Shapeways! Our only request is that you enable 3rd party sites like ours to embed your feed. When will that be possible?
3D Printing the Rosetta Stone for Kids Toys: Nerd Dad Triumph
Carnegie Mellon Professor Golan Levin has built the Rosetta Stone for kids toys. His Free Universal Construction Kit is a design for parts that enable interoperability between Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and several more popular toy brands. The catch? If you want these parts, you have to 3D print them yourself!
In what Forbes calls the “ultimate nerd dad triumph”, Levin and his former student Shawn Sims made sure these parts will fit:
Levin and Sims didn’t just make near replicas of the commercial toys, they used a measurement tool called an optical comparator to copy the toys’ dimensions to within 3 microns. And then they published those models on the Web. “Our lawyers were a bit concerned,” admits Levin, so much so that the pair initially planned to release the project anonymously.
Back in April, we highlighted the potential disruptive impact 3D printing could have on the toy industry.
With the price of toys so marked up, it’s within reason to think that kids will turn to generics or pirated designs to fill out their toy chest after parents tap out the budget at retail.
Look back at the music industry. The only way to buy music in the late 90s was to purchase the full album at retail. Then Napster and other P2P sharing software came along and allowed consumers to download individual mp3 songs, albeit pirated. When iTunes launched with individual song pricing and a more reliable service than the P2P networks, consumers flocked to the legal alternative. The retail music industry died but the digital music industry was born.
Perhaps in the next 5 years we’ll see the retail toy industry collapse and be replaced by a digital successor. The question is whether we will see a digital toy black market in the interim. In our view, that will be up to the toymakers and their willingness to disrupt their current model.
Has Levin truly liberated construction toys from working only with their own kind? Will this type of innovation improve or hurt sales and prices of popular toy brands?
See the full poster of toy compatibility at Slideshare.
The video below shows how the Free Universal Construction Kit works. Notice how the voiceover makes it feel like a proper 1980s advertisement.
Read the full story about Levin’s project at Forbes.
