Due to personal circumstances I will be taking a break from Maker Librarian and putting the site on an extended hiatus. Thanks to everyone for their support and I hope to be back in a few months.
Until then, keep making, hacking and creating!
Michael Weinberg, Vice President of the Institute for Emerging Innovation at PublicKnowledge.org, has just released a follow up to his influential 2010 whitepaper It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology.
What’s the Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing? looks at developments over the last two years and examines issues of infringement in greater depth.
“Upon visiting Openhouse’s 3DEA Pop Up Store at the Eventi Hotel, we were taken with the evolving 3D printing technology and how it has been applied to fashion and design. Designers Aaron Trocola, Heidi Lee, Mary Huang, Pauline van Dongen, and Dirk van der Kooij showcased fashion and industrial design pieces that push the boundaries – creating custom items that are strikingly beautiful and unique.”
Open source hardware, open source firmware and open source industrial design has seeped into our reality. Open development of products, art projects, and all physical things occur on a blindingly rapid and ever forking path. From circuits to software to housings, learn about engineering on a different plane of transparency.
In this talk you’ll hear about how the almost accidental open sourcing of one small chip, the Realtek RTL2832U, is causing huge ripples through entire disciplines. Join the ride with the blindingly fast hardware iterations of an open source hardware company, and the often hidden implications for the hardware. Be pulled into the story of strange fringe knitting machine hardware, the Brother KH930, brought back from obsolescence. Learn about weird art projects like the Orchidarium and Massage Couch that might not be so artsy and actually useful after all. Watch strange ideas become actual items in our world, and how all of this is possible primarily with open hardware.
“The ironic thing about rapid prototyping is how slow it is,” he comments. He’s also sceptical about the usefulness of 3D printers: “I think if the quality goes up and the price comes down then a lot of people will get them,” he predicts, but asks ”do we really want people at home printing off a load of rubbish?” — Dominic Wilcox
