Jeffrey McGrew's blog

So with all the talk recently both in favor of and the rather cynical counter-take on the whole 'new industrial revolution' I figure that it might be good for someone who's personally involved within that movement to state their thoughts on the topic. Take it for what you will, for this is just my view of the situation, but so far most of what I've seen written about it hasn't come from anyone directly involved with it.

Who am I to talk about it? Well, a few years ago my wife and I bought a CNC routing table without much idea beyond making cool stuff with it. As a matter of fact, it's the very first blog post on this blog. We'd never even used a CNC machine before, actually never even seen one before in person, but figured that we could figure it out, and with help from others online and the company we bought it from we got it running. We started making stuff for friends. That blossomed into a business. Pretty soon we quit our day jobs, and now we're even hiring people. We were the first ones to bring a CNC router to Maker Faire. Hell, my wife and business co-founder's picture was on the poster for the first two years of Maker faire. So we're smack in the middle of this 'movement' I think.

Everyone seems to be having a hard time figuring out exactly what to call what we're doing. We've had this problem too. In fact, I have yet to hear anything that really nails it. But this guy comes the closest with the thought of calling it 'punk manufacturing'.

Let's take a brief look at punk rock then. OK, so before punk, it was thought that in order to be in a great band you'd need to be a virtuoso. Get signed by a big label and all that. Rock music was all about big production, big ideas, big marketing, and 15 minute guitar solos. Then along comes punk. Suddenly, anyone with a good idea and passion can have a great band. Get rich? Probably not. But at least have a chance to be something more than whatever they were before. Have some great stories. Maybe even make enough money to just play music and not have to work some crap job.

And for most that was enough. I mean, heck, leisure for half the people on this planet is a full stomach, so getting to play music for a living, even if it's a lower middle class living, sounds like a hell of a deal to me. Sure, by the second or third wave you had punk bands like Green Day making a killing, and all that big media stuff getting back into it, but even those Green Day guys were starving teenage punks at one point, just playing music because they loved it, and riding that for as long as they could.

So now we've got the 'Makers Movement'. The new industrial revolution. But honestly, it's just a bunch of folks that via new possibilities can do what they have always wanted to do: make stuff. I think that both extremes of the Wired article and Gizmodo's response totally miss the fundamental point: it's really about freedom. Freedom for those of us who have only wanted to make things, to be able to do so, and make enough of a living that we can spend all our time doing what we love.

The sad reality that I have seen today is that anyone interested in making things goes to school for many years with the hope of being able to make fantastic things. Then they graduate, only to work on soul depraving things for years on end. Either pushing lines around in a CAD program drawing bathrooms, or designing headlights to purposely break in around five years. These are the tasks kids out of collage are given, and it drains them. Only after working for a very long time, or playing well at inter-office political games, or becoming an academic to support themselves, or being really, really lucky, only then do they even have the very remote chance of being in any sort of leadership role; deciding what's getting made. I know so many disheartened engineers, architects and industrial designers. Once in the real world, they've found that no matter how good their ideas are, or how much passion they have, or how hard they work, it simply dosen't matter. Until they fight their way to the top they are going to be nothing but a cog in some vast design machine.

We all went into this wanting to make stuff, and came out not making much of anything.

So along comes cheap hardware, cheap CNC machines, and the Internet. Suddenly, we can all make stuff. All the stuff we've always wanted. And, hopefully, we can find lots of people to sell it to. People who love it. Heck, maybe we can even keep our day jobs, and make stuff on the side. Or we can start our own business 100% and see if our ideas will really fly. We can make the stuff that our friends will love. We can make the stuff that we love. It opens up vast new areas. Just like with punk, all it takes is an instrument and an idea and you're on your way. Are you going to be a rock star? Get rich? Probably not, but who cares about all that corny self-centered stuff when you're having this much fun simply doing it?

So will it change the world? You know what, us Makers really don't care. We're having too much fun doing what we love. We're free to simply follow whatever idea we've got as far as we can. If you think for a second I'm not going to ride that for all I can, when all I've ever wanted to do in my life is make great things, then you've got a strange idea of how people work.

There seems to be a crazy idea today that if you're not trying to be the next Google, that whatever you're doing is stupid. Or if what you're doing isn't going to make you famous, then it's not worth doing. The truth is, most people would be more than happy to be free to do what they love and make enough money at it to have a decent life.

Honestly, I can't help but wonder if both the Wired wild-eyed fanboy response, and the very cynical counter-response, is partially from envy, and partially from being bitter at being stuck at a desk job. What's wrong with a bunch of new small business sprouting up all over America? Small business built this country, small business are the backbone of this country, and frankly, big business has zero interest in a lot of local issues where small businesses are all about local issues. If this movement launches a slew of new small businesses, I think it will indeed have an impact on our world, every bit as much as the Internet has.

The Gizmodo article does raise one very valid point: not everyone is going to be part of this thing. Which is fine, really. Everyone having access to guitars didn't make us all punk rockers. Everyone having access to a computer didn't turn us all into programmers. Everyone having access to a worldwide publishing system didn't make us all interesting bloggers. So everyone having access to manufacturing capability isn't going to make everyone suddenly a professional Maker. And that's OK.

Let's look at it this way: I'm now a small business owner, making a middle-class life for myself, and starting to employ others. While over the last two years the world famous Architecture firm I used to work for has laid off almost half it's staff. Working for a big company is no more stable than what we're doing, and heck, what we're doing seems to be working pretty well so far. I'm adding a lot more value to the overall GDP and my local community now then I was when I was working for that big firm. I'm creating real value, here, in my backyard. And while I loved working at that big firm, and running our own thing is terribly stressful and hard at times, man, I wouldn't go back unless I had absolutely no other choice.

In other words life isn't just about profit, nor is that the only meter one should measure a business with. I feel both Wired and Gizmodo totally missed the point here: it's about freedom and happiness, plain and simple.

We're excited to be invited speakers at 2010's Shopbot Jamboree, their annual convention!

It's going to be tons of fun to go and visit where Frank, our CNC routing table, came from as well as get to meet a whole new circle of great Makers. We're really looking forward to it!

We're going to be talking about some business and online marketing stuffs. So catch us in North Carolina in April!

As our Drupal chops get (slowly) better we've been able to do more and more with our website. Now using a combo of the Views and View Slideshow modules, we were able to make ourselves a better frontpage. Expect to see something similar soon in the store section as well!

Check it out!

Pick up the February addition of Fast Company off the news stand to see Because We Can highlighted in the "Fast Talk" section of the magazine!

This month is about innovative LED lighting, and our Interactive LED tables were used for one of the full page spreads.
Complete with Jillian and Jeffrey in their Because We Can red jumpsuits!

The table used in the photo shoot is the Ripple. Shown also in the photo below.

We're honored to be included in this year's BIMForum conference in Phoenix, AZ! We'll be giving a talk about BIM-to-CNC fabrication on Thursday afternoon, January 14th, at 3:15 pm. We'll be focusing a lot on our in-house process we use to go from BIM to Digital Fabrication. We'll also be talking about the big changes that have been recently happening in that space. With a few fun things to show off, we've got high hopes that it will be a great talk!

In the past, CNC machines were used to solve one of two problems: either you needed to make a whole lot of something quickly, or you needed to make something that wasn't easy to make by hand. CNC machines were all about high production rates. And they had to be, for they were ungodly expensive, and the software and know-how even moreso. But now with CNC machines getting cheap enough, and the knowledge widespread enough, so that anyone can use them for almost anything they can think of, well, it really changes the whole game. And that's exactly what were going to be talking all about!

The BIMForum conference is held twice a year by the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group akin to the AIA or AIGA but for builders. With a focus on emerging technology and it's use in the building industry, BIMForum looks to be wonderful conference of AGC people. People who are really making changes and making things work. So many of these technology-focused building industry talks can wander into the tall reeds of theory. So we're rather interested in talking to a bunch of people who are more about the day-to-day realities of getting things built! We're really looking forward to meeting everyone.

Hope to see you there!

Penny Arcade recently launched it's own video show, highlighting all things Penny Arcade. It's a wonderful look into a great company, and the highlight so far we think is the latest episode about Child's Play, the way-cool charity they run.

A fun thing about it is that the conference table we made for them last year makes a cameo in the opening credits and sometimes sneaks into other scenes as well. Awesome! We're proud to have been able to make such a thing, and happy that much gaming of all types (as well as business meetings) have happened over that table. The glow-in-the-dark centerpiece hasn't made it into the show yet however...

Just a reminder that our big holiday party is tomorrow! Please come! Starts at 5 pm, goes 'till 10 pm. We'll be playing games, taking pictures, eating food, drinking drinks, and more!

See you soon!

We're proud to share that we recently won the Design Slam Competition at Autodesk University earlier this month!

The Design Slam is a intense challenge of design, skill, and presentation, all compressed into 20 minutes. Run by Cut&Paste these mini design competitions are for all sorts of different toolsets, from Photoshop to 3D software.

Three competitors are given a design problem (or "brief" as it's sometimes known) a few weeks prior, and are only allowed to bring a handful of pre-made pieces with them. No notes, sketches, or anything else, and all the pre-made stuff you bring gets reviewed by a panel for fairness. Then it's off to the races, you've got to do the entire project in 20 minutes, live, in front of everyone at the same time, and then present your idea. Best person wins. So it's a balance of technical ability, design chops, and presentation skills that wins!

This being at Autodesk University, Autodesk's great get-together, the competitions were all focused on one of their tools. We were invited to participate in the Revit competition, up against heavy-hitters from HOK and Burt Hill, William Lopez Campo & Arman Chowdhury, two amazing people from amazing firms. One of which had already won one of these things in Germany. Stiff competition!

The design problem was to make a temporary pavilion at a French historic site: The Royal Salt Works of Claude Nicolas. Called 'Dangerous Liaisons' it was to help visitors encounter the site in new ways, inform and entertain them, while expressing the site's rich history, both Architecturally and culturally.

Here was the pitch for the judges: Salt crystals grow mathematically from a single introduced flaw, chaos controlled via structure. Supplanted by Culture & Tourism, Salt is no longer the power to France it once was. So we proposed that we turn the Salt Works into a Cultural Works for a summer by reviving the old factory buildings with the temporary installation a CNC router, and in turn fabricating onsite a whole series of elements to celebrate the site and the culture of France.

Not only a series of towers, a view platform, a bandshell, and cafe pavilions would be generated onsite, but also sellable designer products made from the scrap of the sustainable plywood left over.

No two of any of these items would be alike; for the use of parametricly-driven elements, consumer-driven customization, visiting designers-in-residence, and a simple randomizer script would make creating unique items easy and affordable.

The towers would collect power via draped solar panels, which in turn would drive a site-specific wifi network running an augmented reality application for common smart phones for the visitors to interact with.

This application would not only label everything onsite when viewed thru the smartphone, and show visual ghosts of what was to be historically, it would lead the assembly of the various elements via 2D barcode tags attached directly to the onsite fabricated parts. Thus turning the act of building into a celebratory group effort, a structure that wants to be built, and a new utopian model for our current times reflecting the original utopian ideals woven into the site and it’s history.

Finally, everything shown here is ready for CNC fabrication, right now, from this model, ready to go, and we made and brought along a prototype model to prove it! We really wanted to focus on something that was more build-able, less conceptual.

So the images you see here are nicer renderings and a slightly more detailed version of what we did on stage in 20 minutes. A very intense 20 minutes indeed!

Here's the image that Jeffrey created in the Design Slam itself, where he only had time to do one rendering.

We also have a video of it, and we'll post here on our blog again once the 'official' video goes live on the Cut&Paste site!

Also for those Revit heavies out there, we'll be following up with a more Revit-specific post about how we made the towers, complete with some Families for y'all to download and play with!

Blender 2.5 Alpha has been released for testing. Why is this such a big deal? 2.5 includes the long-awaited UI overhaul!
Blender's somewhat-crazy, non-standard UI has a reason and history that most folks don't know. But many try Blender, and give up on it, simply due to it's quirky interface. So it's currently a bit of a loose-loose, it's a hard yet rewarding UI to learn that hinders adoption. But to those that do learn it, they tend to find it to be pretty good.

Let me explain. Blender was originally written as an in-house tool for an European special effects and animation house. It's focus was entirely on making someone who already knows 3D animation and modeling as efficient and effective as possible, and not on ease of use or learn-ability. It was also written for a small, focused group of people with their own ideas and demands, for even after the parent company started selling Blender to other people, it was still a rather obscure tool that only a devoted few used. Later on, the parent company, that special effect house, went under and almost took Blender with it. But the orginal developers were able to raise the money to buy the rights and source-code from the Bankruptcy court, and they, in turn, made it open source. Which gave us a professional-quality open-source actively developed tool with a bizarre UI.

Old and Broken:

Fast forward several years, and the Blender team has re-written the UI from scratch, making it look a little more like Modo in the process, and adding the ability to animate anything, hook into anything, and configure anything. So far it looks like a real winner!

Teh New Hawtness:

So check it out, help with the Alpha, and if you've never used Blender give it a new try and let them know what you think.

The best little CAM software that could just released a new version! Aspire 2.5 shipped today.

We've been helping with the Betas, and are really jazzed about all the new features. The Vectric team rocks!

So go get it already, if you haven't already!