[ Music ] >> Hi. Let's talk about the Thingiverse exercise. First of all, let's provide some background about Thingiverse itself. The Thingiverse website began in 2008. It was launched by MakerBot, the company that democratized 3D printing, and the idea here is to provide an iTunes store for objects. So instead of songs, this site has designs that can be 3D printed. And instead of costing 99 cents, these designs are free. One thing that's unique about this website is that nearly all of the designs have been submitted by individuals rather than companies. Currently, there's about 700,000 designs available for 3D printing. They cover a range of categories from toys and games to useful household items. So you're bound to find something that interests you. Now the purpose of this exercise is to gain hands-on experience with 3D printing and to understand how this technology will affect marketing but also product placement in particular. I found Thingiverse to be especially useful in terms of getting items that can't be found elsewhere. So, for example, I printed this unique pencil holder using Thingiverse. It's a design that was uploaded a few years ago. Printed here on this 3D printer, and people walk in all the time in my office, say where did you get this. I can't find this in the store, and I tell them about Thingiverse. So let's talk about how this exercise works. First of all, go to your browser or simply, you can type in the search box or simply type in the website address, and it's Thingiverse T-H-I-N-G-I-V-E-R-S-E dot com. Here we go, and you'll see the home page of Thingiverse, and there are a variety of ways in which you can navigate this page. First of all, you can hit explore, and you see a variety of submenus. If you go to things, you'll see number of boxes, and each box is a particular design that you could 3D print. You go under this category, you have variety of search terms. So you can either search under the newest and most recently uploaded designs, you can search under popular designs, or designs that have been featured by MakerBot. You can also click random designs. This is a new function. It gets some random objects displayed. You can also do a more focused search, again, go back to explore, and you can hit the categories submenu, and here you have different categories of objects. So we have toys and games, we have fashion, art, household items, and even items for 3D printing. So 3D printers print their own replacement parts, for example. A third way to navigate this website is to employ the search box in which you enter a search term and see what pops up. So let's give that a try. So my last name is Rhineflesh. So in high school my nickname was Rhino, and so that's my favorite animal is the rhinoceros. So let me type in the word rhino and see what comes up. OK. OK. Actually we have 407 different results for rhino, and you probably will find similar a large number of results for the item that you search on. So we have different types of rhinoceroses. OK. So a wide variety of choices here. Some functional; some aesthetic. Actually I like this one, one of these early ones. This rhino 3D scan. This looks interesting. So just click on the design that interests you, and you'll get the home page for that particular design, and you'll see a number of interesting information on this home page. You'll see the name of the design. You'll also see the name of the designer, and if you click on this, you'll get more information about the designer, and if you click on this, you'll get more information about the designer. We'll come back to this momentarily. You'll also get information about the number of views. How often this page has been viewed. In this case, a bit over 2,000 views, and next to it the number of times this object has been downloaded for 3D printing. So here we have about 600 downloads of this item, and we also have the upload date, which was January 7th, which was not very long ago. So this is actually quite a few downloads for a recent design. Let's click on the designer's name, see what we find. And here you find the designer. This individual is using a more of a corporate name called Idea Beans. We can see that this person has submitted 35 designs, achieved 440 likes, and that they're located in Auckland, New Zealand. You go back, we can go back to the design itself. So what you need to do in terms of the exercise once you settle on a design that you like is simply take the name of the design. You can copy and paste this as well as the URL, which has the thing number. This is the number, the item number in which this design had been assigned. Now take both of those pieces of information and either type them or copy and paste them into the course web page in the boxes that we have provided for this exercise. Also, and in addition to that, please take a look at the description. Now the items vary in terms of their descriptions, but see how the product is described, and you might find some very interesting background information. So what's really interesting about this particular design, if you see here, there's two rhinoceroses. There's one that looks like a statute and one that's [inaudible], looks like a 3D print, and, indeed, that's what this is. As we see from this description that this individual actually scanned this statute. He scanned the statute because he had actually had fallen, and one of the legs of the rhino had broken. So he wanted to scan the design to preserve it in case something happened to it. And so we see both images here, and also if you click on some of the images, you'll see different portrayals of the design. So we have here the actual picture of the 3D object as well as the original object, and usually you'll see on, for each design a blue image which is the 3D design image of the product, of the design that can be printed. And so the print should look something like this except it probably won't be in blue unless you decide to print using blue filament. The other thing we like to you to take a look at is the comments. This is the comment box. This is a fairly new design so there's not many comments, and this just gives you some idea in terms of what people are saying about the design, and here, there's actually two comments. The first comment is very complementary. It's thanking this person saying they actually, they had, their team had received a trophy, a rhino trophy, and they're printing this out to have a physical memento of that trophy. And then the second comment is actually a question, which is asking the designer what they used, what technology they used to scan this particular statute, OK. So once you, going back in the instructions, once you upload the name of the design and the URL, we'll go back to the design here, the URL, you can cut and paste. Alright here, cut and paste that. Right up top. Alright. In terms of the assignment, we’d like you to do four things in particular. First of all, please, again, record the name and the address of this design. Second, we'd like you to classify this object in terms of one of the four categories that we discussed about 3D printing. So is this a replacement, a substitute, a solution, or is it a creation? So those are the four categories. We'd also like you to think about why you selected this particular design? What were the reasons that you picked this over the many other options? And, finally, provide some thoughts about how Thingiverse or a website like it, a website library of designs will affect product placement. I look forward to hearing your responses.
