This past week in class, we had presentations from 4 speakers. One from Illini Service Dogs, which provided us with updates and ideas for potential opportunities to explore this semester. The next was from John Hornick, the author of 3D Printing Will Rock the World, via zoom. He spoke to us about what is going on currently in 3D printing, and where 3D printing will likely be in the near future. It was such a cool experience to be able to hear from an expert who knows so much about the industry. One of the things that fascinated me the most was that they are able to 3D print skin and are working on the ability to 3D print bone. He mentioned that they want to utilize this technology in hospitals and VA hospitals, which is incredible. The future of 3D printing is surely going to be amazing!
Our next speaker was Jeff Ginger of the CU Community Fab Lab. Jeff spoke to our class on behalf of the Fab Lab, which we will be visiting as a class in the upcoming weeks. Last semester I took Jeff’s course in Usability of Digital Interfaces, and it was one of my favorite classes I have taken at U of I. Jeff is such an interesting and energetic person! He is full of a lot of knowledge about making and has a very positive attitude that makes his classes fun and exciting. I am very much looking forward to visiting the Fab Lab and learning more from him.
Our third presentation was from our TA Mehmet Aydin. He gave a presentation about Design Thinking and how it can be used to improve situations of all kinds. He showed us the children’s redesign of the MRI machine. He also explained to us our exercise for the class which was going through what we know about our opportunity so far, and organizing our ideas on Post-its. This was a helpful exercise as we worked through it with Adam, one of our mentors, and we were able to clearly define our opportunity areas we will be exploring further in the class.
I am looking forward to learning more about Fusion this upcoming week and beginning to dive into the ideation stage of the process!
That’s so cool that you took Jeff’s course in the past, and I’m sure that you learned a lot from it that you will be using in this course as well. Since you were interested in the idea of 3D printing skin and the applications of printing bio stuff, there’s an article I think that you should check out. It’s about how scientists are now able to 3D print blood vessels in organs! Just for perspective, I actually did a project about 3D printing 5 years ago in my high school biology class, and back then the major issue with bioprinting organs was that they couldn’t figure out how to print the blood vessels in there too! That’s a lot of progress for such a relatively short amount of time, and I think it’s all really exciting. Here’s the link: https://aabme.asme.org/posts/3d-printing-of-blood-vessels-could-be-game-changer