We are pleased to announce the Spring 2016 EDU Grant Winners. The Shapeways EDU Grant is $1000 in printing support awarded twice a year to university level students and professors whose proposals push the boundaries of the materials and technology available in the 3D printing. This spring’s grant recipients are:

Shawn M. V. Jones – Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Shawn will be prototyping a SCUBA flipper for amputees that can also function as a prosthetic device on land.

Pablo Gonzalez – Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, NY
Pablo will be employing 3D scanning along with printing and traditional fabric draping for his senior fashion show.

Jonathan Gerhard – James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA
Jonathan is transforming complex mathematical knot studies from theoretical 2D problems into tangible objects mathematicians can hold in their hands.

Akshay Goyal – Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Akshay’s project Soft Tectonics investigates systems for design and production of
transformative objects through a study of structural collapse and functionally graded material.

Tom O’Mahoney – University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Tom is creating scientifically accurate reconstructions of fossil humans for use in research and academics and sharing his research via open source.

Past grant recipients have completed projects in the fields of applied psychology, product design and mathematics, to name a few. The fall 2015 grant recipients Shanna Chan, Catherine Zheng and Melissa Zucker reflect on how they implemented their project Lunar Gala 2016 Strain – Abraxas and what challenges they overcame and learnings they gained.

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What part of this project could not have been realized without 3D printing?
We would not have been able to realize our vision for our finale dress, which involved intricate parametric patterning that could not have been made with any other fabrication method.

How did support from Shapeways enable you to realize this project?
The Shapeways Grant allowed us to increase our budget and physically be able to 3D print the more detailed pieces within the last look. This helped us realize our whole concept of our line, which depended on a transformation of flowing geometric lines into more complex parametric form. Without the grant, we wouldn’t have had the materials to successfully create such complex

How did this project contribute to your growth as an artist or designer?
We explored alternate ways of fabrication and learned to expand our knowledge of both digital fabrication and mixed media design. We pushed ourselves to learn and use digital modeling software and to design various design iterations that allowed for any buffer room within modular 3D printed pieces.

What was one challenge that you needed to overcome or one thing that surprised you when you were working on this project?
For our fashion line, each article of clothing was custom fit to its respective model. For the pieces made with more traditional fabrication methods, fitting was simple. However, for our 3D printed pieces (and with the breastplate especially), ensuring a good fit was challenging since we were creating 3D models on Rhino software. Because we did not have access to 3D scanners, measurements had to be extremely exact and modeled on our software with great precision. From this work, we learned to be accurate about dimensioning and to be proactive about timing, since we were a little pressed for time with the 3D prints.