I received word today from MakerBot, that my order for their new product, the Replicator, is delayed. Although the e-mail I received refers specifically to my order, I believe this likely applies to all Replicator orders, as my order was placed just after the original product announcement. This isn’t entirely unexpected, as MakerBot is a young company, with a new and experimental product. Nonetheless, I am still a little disappointed, maybe because I’ll have to hang on to my excitement a little longer… or maybe because they decided to take cash up front. Their e-mail didn’t include a new estimate for an updated lead time, I’m hoping MakerBot Support gets back to me on that soon. In the meantime their website is now showing an 8 week lead-time instead of 6 for new orders. Here is the full text of the original e-mail:
Update: According to MakerBot support “worst case scenario” is an additional two week wait.
Hello from MakerBot Industries!
We’re running late with your order for a MakerBot Replicator. We’ve put together a testing program for each MakerBot so that they’ll leave the Botcave in tiptop shape and it turns out that doing things right takes time. In this case, it’s taking a little more time than we expected.
We’ve added a swing shift to deal with the increased demand and we’ve implemented additional Quality Assurance processes to ensure that your Replicator will work as intended when you receive it. Instead of rushing orders that may not be ready out the door, we’re testing these first Replicators with special care.
We thank you for your patience with us during this process. We know it’s tough to wait, but we know you’ll be glad that you did.
Thanks for giving us a little more time with your order.
If you have questions or comments, we’ll be here to help at support@makerbot.com.
Thanks,
Bre Pettis
CEO MakerBot Industries
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Earlier this week, while attending an electronics class at hacklab.to, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Woodworth, founder of Upverter. Upverter is a local Toronto startup, and Y-Combinator alumi company, that provides a platform for social hardware design. The core of their product is an online tool that allows users to collaboratively design schematic circuits for their projects. Instead of struggling to describe the details I recorded a short demonstration of my own:
Here is the embedded schematic of the project in the video:
Seeing software like this popping up is really cool for several reasons. First of all, the pace of innovation is greatly accelerated by saving all of our work in a common pool. Upverter, like many new web apps, makes everyone’s projects searchable. This means newcomers to the field immediately have a library of thousands of practical examples to learn from. Additionally projects can be accelerated by “forking” other people’s designs. This essentially allows you to use another user’s work as a base from which to create derivative works. Finally, because the entire app is ‘social,’ new techniques can become memes and spread quickly among the product’s users. Disseminating knowledge through this new medium allows the state of the art to advance much more rapidly when compared to traditional ways of spreading knowledge. All of these attributes are over and above the obvious benefits of working in a real-time collaborative editing environment with a live database connected to real parts and manufacturers.
Of course, the downside is that as we migrate more of our applications to the cloud, we begin to lose control of our infrastructure and critical tools. Right now Upverter is a small start-up run by idealistic hackers. You can easily download your work in common formats free of charge. But one must wonder, what happens as their company grows and maximizing profits becomes the dominate motivator? Will they still risk their users migrating to another platform by making your files too easy to retrieve? Will they stop supporting a feature that is crucial to your workflow midway through a project? Will the company go under leaving you without access to your entire library of work? These are just a few of the risks we face by allowing our software to reside in a centralized system far from our local machines.
After seeing projects like Upverter I’m highly enthusiastic about the future. Just as our workflows were revolutionized when we began migrating our tools from physical space onto computers, they will again be revolutionized when we migrate from local harddrives to the web. There is tremendous opportunity for discovering better ways of working but also new risks as we begin to lose control of the tools we rely on.
For awhile now I’ve been looking forward to starting an arduino based project. Having already done the very basics, like blinking LEDs, I thought I’d embark on a simple starter project. I picked-up the LoL (Lots of Lights) Shield from a local hackerspace. The kit comes with a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and a crapload of LEDs. Once fully assembled you can control each LED individually allowing you to display images, text, games or whatever else you can think of. As an introduction to electronics I certainly got more then I bargained for in terms of soldering practice:
View Part 2: Here
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I’ve come to think that there exists an interesting dichotomy between growth and robustness in most systems. For the purposes of this post, growth means receiving a positive return on some investment of energy or resources, robustness refers to the ability of the system to sustain itself in a changing environment.
At any given instant, a system has a fixed amount of resources it can allocate to various tasks. Fundamentally, there are two options for how to use these resources: they can either be allocated into familiar areas that are already demonstrating growth, or they can be allocated into unexplored areas in hopes of finding new sources of growth.
A system that places the majority of its resources into known areas that are already yielding strong growth risks getting stuck on local maxima and additionally makes itself systemically vulnerable to contextual change. For instance, a society that invests most of its resources into developing a single energy source, like oil, stands to grow explosively for awhile but might collapse after this resource is depleted due to the underdevelopment of other energy sources.
On the other hand a system that distributes its resources widely, exploring many uncharted areas, will be stuck with anemic growth. This is because many times the exploratory outlay of resources will yield little or no return on investment at all. The upswing is that when resources are allocated in a highly distributed way the system is extremely robust when local regions fail or begin to yield lower rates of return because the system has many alternative sources of growth.
I’ve attempted to visualize this relationship below with an interactive demonstration:
Refresh the page if nothing is happening, click and drag to create regions of high return
In the visualization above, I’ve created a search algorithm that distributes its resources (the little black dots) using a power-law distribution. By clicking and dragging you create regions of high return, the location of which are not known to the algorithm. As the algorithm distributes its resources throughout the search space, inevitably some will randomly fall into the regions of high return (orange dots). The algorithm will begin to dynamically reallocate its resources such that it has a higher probability of creating new dots near ones that have previously yielded a high return. In order to make the environment dynamic, you will see that as more resources are allocated to a region of high return, the size of that region will slowly decrease until it eventually disappears. Crucially the algorithm always maintains a power-law distribution regulating the breadth vs. depth of its search allowing it to dynamically reallocate its resources into new high return areas after explored ones have been depleted.
I find that many of our approaches to problem solving are concerned with optimizing for singular outcomes. In the future, as we attempt to harness the power complex adaptive systems for ourselves, we will become much more concerned about how to distribute resources instead of how to optimize for a single purpose. By carefully understanding the relationship depth and breadth in our resource allocations, we can begin to create dynamic systems that are able to adapt to change while managing our risk profile much more tightly. Hopefully, this can begin to reduce the probability of “black swan” events (like the mortgage crisis) and other existential threats to our society.
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Image: MakerBot.com
Earlier this week I purchased a consumer 3D printer. It was a big investment and in a later post I’ll take some time to review why I believe it will be worthwhile. In the meantime, I want to do a quick run-down of the products that are emerging in this space while the research is still fresh in my mind.
For those who are not familiar, a lot has happened in the last few years in the world of 3D printing. Previously 3D printing was strictly a commercial endeavor due to the high cost of hardware (upwards of $60,000). In the last five years hackers have started cobbling together do-it-yourself 3D printer kits; extremely primitive versions of their commercial counter-parts. These kits effectively work like computer controlled glue guns. Open source software deconstructs 3D digital models into horizontal slices and this information is sent to the printer. The printer uses an extruder to heat up a plastic filament. The extruder is guided by servos in 3 axes allowing the filament to be deposited layer by layer gradually reconstructing the object. What is so revolutionary about these kits is their low cost. At around $1500, a tiny fraction of the commercial versions, the technology is now within reach of individuals. Over the past year this tiny cottage industry has begun to mature into actual companies with fledgling products. Below is a run down of who the players are:
Image: RepRap.org
The RepRap is the printer that got this whole revolution under-way. The project began at the University of Bath back in 2005. The ambition was to create a 3D printer that could print itself. This ambition is a long way from being fulfilled but the project is a huge leap in the right direction. The RepRap isn’t a product per se but a set of open source designs. The process of building a RepRap is extremely long and laborious. It can take several weeks to acquire its many parts and many months thereafter to fully assemble and calibrate the printer. This intensive process represents the cost of being on the bleeding edge, the upswing is that a vibrant community has emerged around the RepRap. This community is constantly improving upon the core RepRap designs and several derivative products have emerged including several of the printers below.
Image: MakerBot.com
Maybe as importantly as the printer itself, MakerBot also owns Thingiverse. Currently Thingiverse is the biggest online community for actually sharing 3D-printable objects. In the long term this might be their biggest asset. As 3D printing becomes mainstream, and real consumers get involved, it will be a tiny minority who fire up their favorite CAD program to draft a new spatula for the kitchen. Instead consumers will gravitate towards these communities where thousands of objects designed by others already exist.
Image: i.materialise Blog
The Ultimaker has a fairly active forum too. Its users regularly share help and advice as well as their projects. If you are located in Europe, I would suggest that this is definitely the printer to look at. I ended up choosing otherwise because after the currency conversion and shipping cost the total price was similar to the dual extruder MakerBot, which I prefered.
Image: printrbot.com
Image: Cubify.com
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A generation from now our descendants will be remarking on the curious etymology of the word ‘phone’. As a smart phone user, I can attest that the ‘phone’ part of my device maybe one of its more trivial features. In a sense, it’s a shame because the word ‘phone’ comes with a lot of baggage. The ‘long distance’ ‘text messages’ and ‘call display’ that we pay extra for are really just silly fabrications at this point. Even the notion of phone numbers is woefully anachronistic in a world of ubiquitous social media. Why are we using silly strings of digits when we can use meaningful identifiers like people’s names to find one another. I created the above image to capture this dissonance as it seems the word ‘phone’ will forever be the name for our personal, portable, connected, general purpose computing device and sensor array.
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Over the holidays, videos of pets playing games on their owner’s iPads were making the rounds on YouTube. The videos are cute and novel but they also gave me pause…
As I tap out this post on my keyboard, a complicated device with over 100 buttons all marked with strange symbols, it becomes pretty clear that an important shift has occurred. We’ve finally refined interaction to the point where these convoluted devices are no longer necessary. Our interface metaphors are becoming so pure and intuitive that they are no longer metaphors at all. The objects flying across the screens in the above videos, although still representations, look and react just as we’d expect them to in real life. The relationship is clear enough that it does not need to be taught, in fact it is so clear that it does not even require a human to operate.
Watching our pets interact, in relatively sensible ways, with the machines we build, represents an important milestone in interaction and usability. What’s even more exciting is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. This interaction is still pretty dumb; its still a picture stuck on a plane. As ubiquitous computing becomes – ubiquitous, we can stop thinking about choosing the right metaphors in our interfaces and begin to start thinking about how to eliminate the interface altogether.
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Architecture is meaning. Other than a few hundred tons of concrete, what separates the shed in your neighbour’s backyard and the Guggenheim in New York City is a sophisticated cultural narrative. Architecture is building with an intent to communicate a message. A building conveys ideas about itself: how its organized, how it should be used. A building also conveys ideas about the society that built it. These messages are carefully crafted by the architect and realized in the discourse of his critics and peers. What separates architecture from the banal is the collective discourse and understanding that surrounds the built form.
This is important because going forward, I believe we will begin to craft buildings in a fundamentally different way. The notion of singular architects, visionaries who decree clear narratives, is being eroded. As the world grows more interconnected, specificity becomes possible where generalizations once reigned. In response, hierarchical organizations are being replaced by decentralized processes. Mass customization will soon become possible in the physical world as it has in the digital one. The consequence is that broad, widely understood messages will be replaced with billions of tiny, contextualized ones. The implication for the built world will be increasingly ad-hoc processes of accretion and change. Their meanings will be more specific, and therefore richer, but increasingly impenetrable to the uninitiated outsider.
Now that information scarcity is over, all of the institutions that we have taken for granted are being revolutionized in this way. The pace of change is unprecedented. Our political structures and laws, formerly pillars of social stability, are no longer able to keep pace. I am interested in investigating the ways that we will be forced to cope with the new world that is emerging around us. As such this blog is intended to be a discourse on meaning. This is a forum for sharing my reflections on how we can comprehend a rapidly changing world that lacks fixed forms and clear narratives.
Related Posts: Visualizing Growth vs. Robustness, We’re Still Calling Them Phones
4 days ago
