User:Vatlark
Blog 1a
5 Things of the Thingiverse
1) Open Source Robotic Arm / thing:387
This robotic arm will allow manipulation of many objects and although the design does not include an STL file, the files included for the plexiglass parts could be condensed to reduce part count and printed on rep-rap
[1]
2) Nautilus Gears / thing:27233 This 'thing' is beautiful from both an aesthetic and design stand point. Printing the project is simple with only 3 part files. [2]
3) Asteroid Vesta - hi res from NASA model / thing:42888 Its a big lump of of 3D printing. Useless. [3]
4)Inverse Colbert / thing:9196 Colbert Bust with a Picasso twist [4]
5)Scary Animal / thing:35897 Cute kind of scary [5]
Blog 1B
Tinkering in America
At a very early age I remember my brothers and I hunting for old electronics around the house just to smash them into pieces. While smashing an old VCR(there all old now), I came to the realization that every little electrical and mechanical part was there for a reason. Not only that, but a person had decided on the design and propose for every part. I think that was the day I became I tinkerer. Equipped with an engineering education and tinkering friends from many backgrounds including engineering, art, chemistry, and math.My ambitions and projects have grown and some of my projects are documented at JosephOberholtzer.com [6].
An article on saloon.com [7] illustrates the differences between the corporate design methods and the methods of tinkerers. Corporate design is driven by the bottom line and as a result does well to enforce the idea that their product is a magical black bock that once broken must either be fixed but them or preferably thrown away and replaced. The author uses the example of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started apple through tinkering with what they had around them. The irony is that currently apple products are the worst offenders this corporate culture. A user can not even replace an iphone's battery without special tooling to brake into the phone. In all fairness this design approach has likely been a result of trying to reach a wider audience by making the design more streamlined and intuitive to the user.
At the end of the article is the line, "...preserving the habitat of the tinkerer is one of the few time-proven ways we as a nation can get back on track." This idea has been proven over and over again as the most successful companies (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc.) were all created by tinkerers.
Lastly, in an interview with Charlie Rose[8], David Kelley gives perspective on what makes his design firm so widely successful. The principals of diversity on the design team and empathy for the end user are iterated repeatedly in the interview. Kelly is a strong believer that every person is creative and the power of self-efficacy. Having a divers group of people on a design team is rare, however it doesn't need to be. I find that almost anyone that I talk to about a design will immediately have ideas on how it could be improved or uses for the design that I never thought of.
At the end of the interview Kelly shows the 3D printer that he is building with his daughter. 3D printing seems like the perfect tool for a design environment that encourages quick prototypes and many iterations of a design. As the Rep-Rap community at Penn State grow it will hopefully pull in a more divers group of people that will offer new perspectives on what the future of Rep-Rap can become. Penn State already does an excellent job of iterative design with a whole new generation of Rep-Raps being build and tweaked every semester. Here is a video [9] of the IDEO design process in action.
