Introducing: 3D Printed "Thing Of The Week" (#3DTOTW) From Thingiverse

For most of last year, I worked as a contract creative and strategy consultant in marketing and communications at the Brooklyn HQ of MakerBot, a manufacturer of desktop 3D printers targeted at the consumer and industrial market.

While working for MakerBot, I had the opportunity to take a deep dive through their Thingiverse fileshare (the largest of its kind in the world) and curate a number of interesting objects into a set of collections. Given the increasing number and complexity of CAD files on this site, it behooves anyone who works in innovation or R&D in manufacturing to take a search/browse run through and look for inspirations (or, copyright/trademark violations -- the Thingiverse team is dedicated and pretty vigilant but at the end of the day, this is user-generated content and therefore the protections afforded to filesharing sites are in place here).

For the first installment of our #3DTOTW, I'll highlight a design that I've helped iterate -- this is an instrument called the MakerLele, first designed by Thingiverse superuser @ericjdurwood and revised by myself and @graphicsforge. It's an electric stringed instrument that fits within the MakerBot Rep2's build volume and that introduces a number of interesting elements into the instrument design mix.

Watch out, Fender and Gibson - the crowdsourcers are coming to eat the low end of your product portfolio ... in the meantime, rock on and more Things to come.