Improvement for your vehicle, win a 3D printed prize

Speaking of Personal Manufacturing, our fast-moving friends over at i.materialise have devised a new 3D printing competition for SketchUp modelers everywhere. The Google SketchUp and i.materialise Pimp Your Vehicle Challenge invites you to design an add-on, attachment or other accoutrement that would improve the transportation mechanism of your choice. Cars, bikes, motorcycles, pogo sticks—designs that would upgrade any mode of transit are all fair game. As an example of one such real-world object, consider the doohickey pictured below: It lets you attach a GPS device to the handlebars of your bicycle.

Judges from i.materialise and the SketchUp team will pick first, second and third-place winners. First prize gets his or her design 3D printed on a Zcorp multicolor printer and a SketchUp Pro 8 license. Perhaps even more interestingly, the engineers and product development people at i.materialise will work with the first-place winner to try to make the winning design a commercial reality.

New cities in Building Maker

Building Maker development continues at a torrid pace. Congratulations to the people of Rome, Italy; New Orleans, Louisiana; Long Beach, California and Malibu, also in California. Your metropolises (and/or pricey beach communities) are now proud members of the getting-less-exclusive-all-the-time cadre of cities in Building Maker. One hundred and fourteen—and counting!



Stunning animations about landscape architecture

The American Society of Landscape Architects has produced a number of beautiful and educational animations collectively called Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes. Even better, ASLA asked our good friend Daniel Tal to write, narrate and produce them with SketchUp. You probably know Dan as a bestselling SketchUp author; it turns out he’s a pretty phenomenal video guy, too. Here’s one of them:

Here’s how ASLA describes the raison d’etre for this project:

These animations and their supporting materials are meant to help the public get a sense of both sustainable landscape design and the type of work that landscape architects do. Each animation has a companion guide to sustainability education resources. Designed specifically for students from kindergarten to 12th grade, the resources include curricula, games, activity guides, and videos to help classrooms explore these ideas in greater depth. All these resources are at your disposal when you are discussing the profession in your communities.

Congratulations to ASLA, Daniel Tal and the National Endowment for the Arts (who provided some of the funding for this undertaking) on their commitment to educating people about the impact that design—both good and bad—can have on their everyday lives. I’ve always believed that the best way to promote good design is to make the tools more accessible. Affordable tools that are easier to learn encourage more people to participate in the process. Participation inevitably leads to understanding, which I think is the key to making better decisions about design.

As both a designer and an educator, I encourage you to watch the rest of these animations and to share them with wild abandon. You’ll be doing the world a favor.