What fun it is to get started in the 3D printing lab. I’ve done some 3D printing before so this week was mostly a review of Tinkercad for me. Some of the design programs I’ve used are more numerical, which fits my personal style better, but Tinkercad is tops when it comes to naming your drawings.

It looked to me like everyone enjoyed their first attempts at 3D printing. I saw several very interesting coin designs. A few of the designs might lose some detail in the final print, but it’s hard to tell until you have your little treasure in your hand.

10/4/14

CST

Devin Bender

“You’ve got no business feeling poorly, young lady”, she said to herself. You are as well set up as you could have dreamed, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen”. pg. 17

You might wonder why I chose this quote or how it is relative to my observations from the field work done in the lab earlier this week, but I feel it was an excellent quote to share due to as I was chatting with fellow students and watching them gain new information and begin the printing process I couldn’t help but feel a sense of optimism for mine and future generations, for with good fresh new ideas and mindful use of technology to enrich and preserve wilderness the youth have a chance to be pioneers of a marvelous future on the globe. I mean you do have to admit if you step back and look we are very much so in the midst of a crucial dramatic interesting and mysterious age where yes there is plenty of evils and too much egoism but on the other hand there is also massive amounts of novel information towards existence and the cosmos from a plethora of genres from the sciences to art all while technology and change are accelerating at faster and faster rates pushing us to stages of more and more connectivity.

Why do people want to learn 3D printing and how does “knowing 3D printing” compare to “knowing how to be a software engineer a few years ago”?

Taking this question literally, as I tend to do, I think knowing 3D printing—in the sense of designing something on a program and using a 3D printer to bring it to physical being—isn’t much different than knowing regular 2D printing a couple decades ago. I might also compare it to digital photography. I feel that the skill is in understanding how to use the program or to even build the printer and not how to plug a file into a machine.

“Kettlewell thought that there were a thousand, ten thousand people as creative as these two out there, waiting to be discovered. Could it be true?- Suzanne

“Why not? Were just here because someone dropped the barrier to entry, made it possible for a couple of tinkerers to get a lot of materials and to assemble them without knowing a whole lot about advanced materials science, wasn’t it like this when the internet was starting out?” -Perry

Doctorow, Cory. Makers. New York: Tor, 2009. 39. Print.

During our first computer lab session the class focused on learning to use tinkercad. The teacher is showing techniques of how to manipulate and use tinkercad online to make 3D computer images for the 3D printers. Students follow along as Arlen demonstrates on his screen on the overhead. Tinkercad is a really awesome online program, there is no software to download, any “tinkerer” can go online and make an account from anywhere with an internet connection. With youre free account you can save and revisit your projects. The first project is basically just to learn by testing and playing with the interface and tools, trying to make a coin or token to 3D print. -Shaye Riano

I noticed a number of things as I observed the Blues this Monday. Many of them worked differently. Some of them were intently watching what Arlen was saying, and doing simply what he showed them to do when he told them to. However, many of the students simply worked as he talked, and played around in Tinkercad, trying to get a feel for how it operated. I was unsure of how it would affect me, but it surprisingly made me believe that Tinkercad was more complex than it actually was. I look forward to observing other such things in the future.

What I observed; The software website we worked on was tinkercad.com.  In Tinkercad we designed a coin and sent it to a 3-D printer.  A few coins had a ruff run but overall it was okay. As a class we were broke up into groups and one group designed the coin and one group observed and then we switched. While observing I asked a few students what they had trouble with and some said adjusting the  size of the object they were working on. Other than that it seemed like a pretty good experience tinkering and learning.

‘”OK, that’s really cool, but I have to ask the boring question, Perry. Why? Why build a toast robot?”‘… “What I’ve got here are my own constraints. I’m challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial  problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill.”‘

Observing what the makers of class were inventing on tinkercad was a bit like stepping into someone’s mind. Never before have I experienced a way to express  a 3D construction so literally as tinkercad allows. The fact that I could imagine  an object, and within minutes have the object represented in front of me with  exact precision blew my mind, and I could sense an excitement and playfulness  around the room. I saw people creating coins that somehow reflected  themselves, like using favorite symbols or numbers, but a question that surfaced  in discussion with the makers of the class and in Makers, is that question why  we create. Why do we put our minds, or ourselfves  into material objects. One  answer that we arrived through discussion, is humans innately want to improve themselves and the world around them by challenging themselves and exploring where the limitations of
the mind and the material may be.

MMM

what is important about that special moment, that precipice-moment before something comes into materiality?
using the internet to “know” something, recreating that something on the computer, and then bringing it into the physical world via 3d printing… (recursion, artifice, interpretation)

NO TCHOTCHKES SIGN
value, power, access, resources
can anything we make ever truly be meaningless?
even if it seems superfluous, isn’t there MEANING to a superfluous gesture enacted by the masses?
(how many people does it take to make an executive decision?)

FIELD NOTES + AFFECT

listening back through my audio recordings, i am struck by the low buzz that permeates the background.  those indiscernible voices and clicks and rustlings form a sum greater than its parts…. what is it?

On my first day back in school after a nine year hiatus I found myself…

“The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they’d been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they’d been abandoned, they hadn’t been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she’d left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually farmed by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.”

Growing up down the street from the local mall provided various insights throughout time. It provided some of the first employment, date sites, and hangout spots for so many. Today the few megalithic malls that exist are in such a state of disrepair one would struggle to see the same institution thriving just a few decades ago. Stories are popping up all over the world of the old corpses of shopping have been refurbished into galleries, libraries, churches, and natural habitats. Most though have just lowered the standard of quality for the wares sold, becoming dirtier and more tailored to serving the impoverished.

Detroit today has both sides of the coin present, as the auto industry becomes less of a figure in the public community we see the bane and boon of the death of an industry. The unemployment and the impoverishment are unavoidable in situations where companies collapse, this paired with the rise in crime that also appears to be entangled would make Detroit highly undesirable. The other hand presents falling cost of land at an extremely rapid rate along with the ability to obtain recycled materials makes the option much more plausible. In makers we hear about ,”a couple of weird cases, actually farmed by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.” (Makers)

The future holds such bounty and destruction. Even know when our economic positions nationally and abroad suffer it is easier for some to acquire wealth now more than ever. Urban farming and maker spaces are just some of the examples of how creative current people are reshaping the way our cities and lives work. It is important to take away from the fact the trash to some is treasure to others. Our role in the coming decades will not be to produce by rather to repurpose and retool existing technologies without the guidance of corporate rules but rather one of autonomy and peer revision.

In “Makers,” Doctorow describes a team working near such an abandonment in Florida, using the resources of what has become the ever present junk pile compiling about our streets of consumerism. Landfills becoming goldmines is no novel concept but to begin to think of them collectively as a ‘Lego Box’ with the ability to reconfigure our very notion of what is ‘raw material’ gives way to more than ever before. Technologies bringing about golden ages has happened throughout history and now again our vey fabric of society and objective reality has been cast on to the stage once again. The ability to create has brought about the very anthropocentric society we live in today, now in order to progress to something better we must change our scope.

We must build scaleable ideas that can be quickly and successfully implemented on what has become the scaffolding left behind from the 1900′s. Our landscape here in America, with its bisecting roadways, cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, all attached with parking lagoons could become something vastly different rapidly if the correct ideas were socially created. No one idea will ever be able to encompass all local areas fully but rather emergent technologies combined with an overarching mindset and teams of driven individuals local economies could become global competitors and specialized patricians for any industry imaginable. 

Excerpt From: Doctorow, Cory. “Makers.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=53FBC78B36F00BF389830E420322DA54

Bibliography:

Doctorow, Cory. Makers. New York: Tor, 2009. 33-34. Print.

look!!!! how quaint!!!!!!! a rabbit!!!!!!!!!!!! a blue one at that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The lab bustled with activity.  Computer arbiters seized their processing machines, wrenching the controls furiously.  Involuntary facial expressions on the faces of these young 3d world builders allude to a subconscious turmoil, a pull between potentiality and reality.  In their minds millions of tiny skirmishes are taking place on a microscopic level.  At a crux, when a neuron faces the impasse of two choices, one synaptic branch or the other, this is the firefight.  A metronome of futures engaged in combat.  There can be only one.

This is my TEST post.

I am currently in my Making Meaning Matter class at Evergreen State College.

Hello my name is Brandon Fortner, this is my first post.

My first post:)

My first post is going to be boring, because it really has no topic. I will be doing things such as making links that lead to places you already know how to get to. Plus, this guy and his 3D printed hands

. 

First post on this blog! I’m excited to start updating and sharing my progress in this class with all of you who read this. Here is the workshop outline.

write write write write wright

Bruhh

Hello me. Here is the test post lalalalalalala…

This is a test.  Wow.  

10/4/2014

“Really impressive.  So that’s what you’re going to do for Kodacell, make these things out of recycled toys?”

-Suzanne

“Nope, not quite.  That’s just for starters.  The Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus.  Everywhere you look, there’s devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything.”

-Lester

My observations from our first 3d lab session are much like Suzanne’s when first being introduced to Perry and Lester’s creative process.  I found myself amazed at all the different ideas and creative energy in the room.  After the first creation, a whole world of possibilities opened up and one by one students began to realize that they had the ability to make anything, spin it around on a computer screen with the flick of a mouse and then turn their design into something tangible by way of a 3d printer.  So, no…these Makers won’t  just be making coins out of fermented corn, this is just the beginning to everything and anything.