Mar. 26, 2015 | By Simon
While it’s easy to get excited about the latest and greatest in additive manufacturing technologies, perhaps some of the best developments that we’ve seen involve collaborative projects that not only make use of 3D printing as a way of manufacturing an object, but also in bringing a community of like-minded makers together.
To help celebrate their first anniversary, France’s Makershop - a sort of all-in-one stop for everything 3D scanning and 3D printing - organized over 70 makers to contribute towards making a single chair made up of over 70 different jigsaw puzzle-like pieces that each have the signature of the maker who produced it.
The full-scale (and functional) jigsaw puzzle chair- which they are calling the Maker Chair - was born out of the idea that the company wanted to encourage the maximum possible number of people to contribute to the creation of a completely customized and crowdsourced puzzle.
To create the chair, the design team at Makershop leveraged the open source “Bits & Parts” chair that was created by Joris Laarman’s digital fabrication studio, Joris Laarman Lab. Laarman and his team developed the Bits & Parts chair as a spin-off project of their Makerchair series that encourages open source designs that can be 3D printed.
As for Makershop’s version of the Bits & Pieces chair, each of the 70 makers on the Maker Chair team received one 3D file for a piece of the chair on which his or her name was carved. Once a maker had received their part, all that was needed was to contribute their own print in whichever color they wanted.
Finally, all of the pieces were assembled into the chair structure much like a traditional jigsaw puzzle.
While Bits & Parts have offered their chair design to be downloaded and 3D printed for awhile now, this is only one of the first use-cases that we’ve seen. Among other reasons why we haven’t seen too many of the chairs is likely because the cost of filament to produce such a large object is considerably high. However when taking into account that if each person just prints a single piece, it becomes clear how collaboration and 3D printing can go hand-in-hand together so well.
To find out more about Makershop - including both their physical store and their online store - be sure to check them out over at Makershop.fr. To download your own 3D printable chair, head over to Bits & Parts.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
Maybe you also like:
- New Zealand engineer Lance Abernethy 3D prints the world's tiniest working cordless drill
- Now you can 3D print your very own Paul McCartney
- Historical artifacts destroyed in Iraq by ISIS to be restored using 3D modeling and printing
- Virtual Foundry reveals that their 3D printer metal filament can now contain up to 99.9% metal
- Polish author Jacek Dukaj releases sci-fi eBook complete with 3D printable stl files
- Greek OpenBionics unveils affordable, light-weight 3D printed bionic hands with 144 grasp movements
- Open Board Game is an open framework for creating 3D printable board games
- Polish company unveils Gaja 3D printer version 2: Gaja Multitool with interchangeable heads
3Ders.org provides the latest news about 3D printing technology and 3D printers. We are now seven years old and have around 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
