 3D printing is building up from the bottom, layer by layer, stacking of materials. It's really a bottom up and a left to right and a forward and back kind of technology. It can make an experience happen. It can make something more than just an object. Our whole focus is on making 3D printing technology do what can't be done. Build something small, build it really well, and go put it out on the market, go test it, go ride it. It could be education or it could be prototyping or it could be just general exploration of ideas. It's not the technology, it's the ideas that feed into them. That's what matters. The average consumer that hears about this technology will want to explore a whole bunch of different areas. They might start up with what we call trinkets and that's printing, you know, inanimate objects that sit on your tables. But then they'll slowly figure out what's good for them, what the technology is really going to benefit them, how it's going to benefit them. All we do all day long is take away material. We build a bigger piece and we take it away. And we're constantly battling with waste material. We have extra overstock. We have to fill the dumpsters. And in the back of my mind, very excited about 3D printing, but still very much rooted in subtractive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing for me is ultimate customization. The ultimate way to make one-offs that was never possible in any other way. You know, the ability to prototype quickly, to obtain an object quickly, and to bring that one thing that I want that nobody else on this planet can have. Traditional model-making skills are still really important even with a 3D printer because you have to be able to assemble it and then do the body work to get that finished product that's practical. We clay modeled and used sandblast resist to get our compound curves and to rough it out. Then we put it on our 3D scanner, scanned it. I was able to more efficiently manufacture the two different sizes that I needed to fit each actor. We have typically eight days to complete an episode, whatever workload they give us. And what we're able to do now is give them a better product in that amount of time and 3D printing certainly helps us do that. We are an art and design institution and we try to engage students in the process of research and we also try to engage students in new technologies and get them up to speed on what's available and how they would interact with it. One of the biggest problems we have is that many commercial 3D printing technologies are expensive and for students they're prohibitively expensive. So we have a range of 3D printers. This object is printed on a commercial machine that costs an institution about $50,000 and this object might cost about $40 or $50 to print. This object, which is exactly the same form, was printed on this tinkering machine and might cost $0.75. With Emily Carr we've been able to develop a proof of concept for a small run manufacturing line to develop runs of wheels in as small batches as 200 sets of wheels. Rain had one big problem in terms of getting their skateboard wheels produced. They had to go through a commercial supplier and they had to order them in very large quantities. So what we wanted to look at is ways of producing wheels cheaply and quickly and locally. So taking those 3D printed cores and trying to find a way to make that mold cheaply, one day Phil walked in with a tube and said, well let's just put it in here. We can brace it at one end, brace it at the other and hold it in the middle and we'll pull your earthen over it. And out comes this and you just break it apart and you have wheels. You could take this and you could produce two wheels or you could make this tube very long and you could produce 100 if you wanted to, no problem. We're going to try and bring multi-materials into the desktop 3D printing space. The ability to explore carbon fiber, metal, wood and to start to get a sense for people what they can start to make for those particular applications. These are some of the earlier test prints that we did on the silicone printer and we're really looking into combinations of materials, really trying to find the right combination of fabric and silicone. So right off the bat we had all of this technical fabric and we found that fabrics with natural fibers in them like hemp fabrics or something that's a cotton blend really grabs the silicone kind of because of the micro porosity of the fibers that are inside of the fabric. So I printed a channel of the silicone and then bent the copper wire into it and then printed a final pass over it so there's all of this kind of hidden rigidity inside of the fabric that you can get out of it. The conductive path is printed with this kind of serpentine and then it's attachable on the skin and then it can sense sweats. So harsh monitoring is available with a stretchable sensor we were working on the two-dimensional printed electronics now. We studied this kind of modeling with 3D printing and then we embedded this knowledge on two-dimensional printed electronics right now. So in my lab the designed alloy and the developed alloy we're using is maintaining viscosity or the higher viscosity after printing. So the reason we're making lower melting temperature alloy is alloy can be fabricated and then it can be fused and then married down about 150 degrees C which is the range of plastic melting When metal material is passing through the 3D printer's nozzle it can be melt down and fused down and then it can be spread it cannot form actual structure as we designed but if we have alloy material which has fixotropic behavior it can be melt down a little bit and then once it is passing the nozzle it can form its actual width so it can contain its fixed shape So we want to make a stack of filament which the material doesn't need to be melt down My research can initiate and innovate to the path of 3D printed smartphone because our focus is higher resolution conductive printing So we want to generate compositor which is 3D printable light mechanically durable as well as environment from once again And we're essentially developing a new wearable air quality monitor What this will do is allow people to detect the levels of pollution that they're exposed to as they go about their day wherever they are and then they can essentially change their activities and where they go and what they do with this additional data feed and this will be important for people with chronic lung disease especially The freedom of complexity that additive manufacturing or 3D printing allows for the iterative space, the iterative design process it's really incredible and it's well matched it's an appropriate technology for that space So what we're aiming to do is allow our customers to de-risk their assets going into clinical trials, in other words they feel more confident about the response of the drug as well as allow the customer to test drugs that they may not have otherwise been able to even test So what we can do is use 3D printed human tissue models for developing new drugs and what we're trying to do is make more advanced models that better replicate the human tissue physiology Aspect Biosystems is unique from the technology perspective so we've taken a combination of microfluidics technology and combined that with 3D printing technology to make a completely new type of 3D printer that we call lab on a printer We can perform certain laboratory functions within the print head itself before the bioink in this case is extruded Without necessarily having a lot of expertise in manufacturing or physical product creation, I think the 3D printing democratizes in a sense the access to the ability to create 3D physical products We are talking about customized one or two products 3D printing has a huge advantage in terms of cost compared to conventional manufacturing As the technology advances further we will get to the point where we can print off full organs So I think within probably 10, 15 years, maybe even less we'll be seeing that kind of thing come out I'm excited about when printers, when home printers get robust enough to print a usable part, something I can put in my ski bindings to replace something or try something new and go ski it It's being manipulated and transformed and integrated across a huge spectrum of cultures and that is new If we could have a 3D printer that printed the core, printed the wheel mold poured the urethane and popped out finished product I'd be in heaven, I'd buy as many as I could get my hands on