Hasta La Ideas

In order to ensure that all incoming students are comfortable (at comparable levels of proficiency) with the skills, processes, and facilities they’ll be engaging from day one of their first semester, the Designed Objects program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) recently created the first classroom in the world equipped with a class-count of individual 3D printers with support from Printrbot, Taulman 3D and Simplify 3D. The 11 students were encouraged to 3D print output by proposing textiles, printing intelligence and a future that celebrates the immediate, provisional, and transient. The course is action-oriented and exhibition-driven, and is more about experiencing fast and complete cycles of realization (with idea development de-emphasized in favor of range of exposure).

Although the incoming class participates in the summer intensive every year, this was the first year that 3D printing was part of the curriculum. Instructor Brian Anderson was in conversation with Printrbot for a personal project early in the summer and our exchanges expanded into the possibility of pulling together the first classroom with so many accessible printers, and the desktop 3D printing component ended up taking the final quarter of the six-week course. Here he shares the story behind “Immediate Objects: Explorations in 3D printing.”

Text & Images courtesy of Brian Anderson

Each year, SAIC’s incoming Master of Design students spends six weeks in a pre-term boot camp exploring the how and when of rough and refined design visualization and prototyping. Through daily and weekly projects the class advances digital design skills and gains comprehensive exposure to the fabrication and production capabilities across the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Using these capabilities and tools, students in the course explore approaches to visualization and construction ranging from simple to sophisticated and exhibit drawings and objects developed through integrated approaches. This summer, the Designed Objects boot camp culminated in a week-long 3D printing intensive, a low- to medium-fidelity laboratory that explored the idea of ubiquitous 3D printing.

Because of the relatively high price of equipping classrooms with ten or more semi-pro 3D printers, courses focusing on digital output often can only afford to provide students access to one or two machines. Responding to this impasse, I conceived of a collaboration intended to marry accessible, low-cost 3D printing (the Printrbot Simple is the world’s least expensive 3D printer) with a print material that is readily optimized in terms of print volume and strength (it takes less nylon to achieve high structural integrity and Taulman 3D is actively involved in developing this and other aspects of print output) and lastly a simplified and robust software interface and workflow (Simplify 3D’s Creator software).

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