User:Blacklaser

Blog #1

Part A: 1. Useful [1]

I like this book-end. I think it is very helpful thing to get our novels or CDs organized. The book-end has simple shape which should be very easy to be printed out. With bright colors, this book-end will looks beautiful.

2. Artistic/beautiful [2]

I find this vase looks very beautiful if it could get printed with a warm bright color. In addition, I choose this vase is because it can full fill the advantage of 3-D printing. It could be very hard to use conventional method to make one of these vases, but it may be easy to print one out. On the other hand, the scientifically design is pretty cool, when I first saw it, the idea about parallel universe jumped out of mt mine. So I picked this one as the art of science.

3. Pointless/ useless[3]

This special .38 round design seems pretty useless to me. I think this design is very simple, simple structure, boring surface effect, small size and pointless topic. A .38 round printed by PLA weighted nothing, the surface would not be very smooth but very difficult to have good curve on the top. I believe if this bullet is printed out, instead of being a bullet, it will just look like a small piece of plastic junk. In a word, useless.

4. Funny/ weird[4]

This garden toad looks very cute and funny. There are a few designs for toad but this one is the best. I also reviewed some other models printed out by other people. I have to say this funny toad has really good design, all models printed have very good quality, and especially a green one looks awesome.

5. Scary/ strange[5]

With highly detailed designs, this Celtic skull looks great. Since it looks so realistic and crazy, it a kind of scary, especially printed with green PLA with some transparency. Imagine you wake up early in the morning and see this thing sitting next to your bed……

Part B I thought I was not entered the level of a tinkerer, however, after I watched the video and read the webpage, I feel I am in the right track. I started to know about PC hardware when I was 9, started to assembly PC all by myself in 2002. I kept focusing on PC until 2006 then I stopped paying too much attention on it, basically because, first, I was familiar with every kind of hardware, I knew most of the parts in market, I could list all the parts that needs to be purchased for every price level without doing any kinds of research, but I think that is stupid. After paying attention to that industry for years, I was tired about what was and is going on in that industry, more cores, higher operating frequency, more stream processors and higher power required. It seems the whole industry is trying to double everything but half the price, year for year. I felt it is useless to know what the timing for a RAM is and how much money should be paid for a good motherboard with correct chip set, since I know which data is valuable and I can take five minutes to look them up on the internet and make the decision. Instead, I started to think about questions like, what should be the next breakthrough, what is more valuable for a PC for a buyer with typical use, where is the trend. When I first heard about the acquisition between AMD and ATI, my first thought was, “WOW, Nvidia must work on their own CPU, or, die.” I discussed this with my friend roger, I said, Nvidia must develop their own CPUs and they will, I bet $100 that they will have their processor product within one year. Several months later, NV announced their CUDA and I got my $100. Now, NV is the leading company for making mobile processors, now their mobile products are better than the original CPU maker AMD, even Intel. I have maybe hundreds of examples which can show I am thinking ahead of other people, no matter PC hardware, mobile electronics, industrial design or many other areas. There are a few people I know that also think a lot, but many of them are only interested in one area and most of them are one step behind me. For the readings, I do not quite agree with the author for some points. He thinks large corporations are killing the tinker tradition. I agree that try to make something new to make more money is a kind of nature, however, since technology is greatly developed and systems are getting much more complicated, many things can only be done by a large group of people. I have a good example. In the year 1903, two tinkerers, White Brothers, designed and flied the first airplane in human history; given a dozen of talented engineers, they can build pretty amazing airplanes in the 1940s by themselves. However, there are only 5 countries in the world that have completely independent modern aircraft industry, USA, Russia, China, France and UK. Though Germans are really good at machines, Japanese are talented and hardworking, they can’t. A modern aircraft industry requires thousands of different industries’ support. An industry chain for a modern airliner may have tens of thousands companies, even more than one million people involved. Not all the problems can be solved by individual tinkerers. Furthermore, many areas need people that only have really high level of education and good sense of specific knowledge. Many engineers, maybe an aerospace engineer, spend their whole life working on a very small piece of a big system, i.e. an engineer focusing on only the tip of the wing, which is probably short than one feet. In many areas, people have to test a lot to get a good result, they have to see the result to make designs, or decisions. Another aircraft example, all aircraft configurations have to test many times in the wind tunnel before hit the market, some of the models are tested more than one millions times. So, it not like 18th century that one bright idea comes out a tinkerer’s mind and changed the world, it is not impossible, but very hard. I agree that to think like a tinker is good, but corporations are not the reason that slows down the society, critical thinking plus people working together will have better result. As an international student, I think Americans always think interesting things and always have good ideas, which is good, but to let people think critically and effectively plus hardworking is the ultimate way to get the nation stronger. I think one important idea I got from the video is to always ask user “what drives you crazy with our product”. I think this is a very effective way to get better feedback and then better design. The first second I saw their 3D printer project, I felt a little bit disappointed. Since he talked a lot about design, a lot about new ideas and get his daughter trained to be a creative thinker, I thought the project he and his daughter working together should be much more complicated than building a simple 3D printer with all instructions online. Another thing is, as a pioneer of the design industry, I thought he may start the 3D printing project earlier. One principle I learned from his company is try to let people from different knowledge bases working together. Now I am highly agree with him that let people come from different industry sitting together and talk can generate many brilliant ideas.