CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

The 5 Stages of 3D Printing Adoption

www.makerbot.com: After nearly a decade of building 3D printers and teaching the world how to use them, we’ve noticed some trends in how people experience the technology—from a user’s first exposure to their most recent challenges and successes.

3 comments:

Monica Skrzypczak said...

After just reading the article about the volumetric 3D printing, I feel these steps deeply. I’m in the curiosity and learning stage, but have not progressed to excitement since you can’t buy the new type of 3D printer yet. This article feels pretty simplistic, and describes the journey of learning anything new- you hear about it, you learn and research how to do it, you try, you fail, and you push through. It holds true for painting, writing, science; really, any type of learning. The 3D printing setback phase I think is a little different from other new endeavors because you have three different disciplines coming together that you usually don’t deal with at the same time. When you make your own 3D prints you have to have knowledge in 3D CAD software, you have to have an engineering mind to visualize how things go together, and you have to have a design mind to make it look nice and to have new ideas for parts. It’s a lot of things going on and one of the reasons I think this article is good for pointing out and encourages 3D printer creators to push through and do whatever they can with the skills they have.

Kelly Simons said...

I agree with Monica and her comment. While this info graphic is cute and I like how it is visually designed these steps that the author claims are unique to 3D printing can be applied to anything. I will note that I appreciate that the article touches on the setback stage of learning a new thing. I usually get stuck on the setback stage when I want to learn something new. When I do not get something automatically and can not do it flawlessly I give up on it. It is a real bad habit that I am working on as much as I can. The setback stage is the worst, and I am sure I am not alone in voicing this opinion. I really like 3D printing and I want to work on upping my skills while I am still here at school and have the available resources to 3D print and make mistakes while learning.

Mattox S. Reed said...

I think this article and its five stages can be applied to so much more then just 3-d printing. It can be put into a lot of different aspects of creating and designing and even aspects of things in everyday life. I think that Kelly and Monica are dead on when they talk about the set back stages. There are constant set back stages over the course of creating something but often these stages are what drive us to go forward and do what we want to with the project. I know for me if there is something that comes pretty immediate to me I often times tend to ignore it and move on to something else giving it very little thought and possibly not even trying to complete it. In 3-d printing I found this often to come out in the most interesting ways when I tried to do something that was against the limitations of what the printer could physically do and I would have to figure out how to create something to combat that problem. It's interesting and this article's infographic I think puts it into a great easy to look at format.