Will the Next Revolution be 3D Printed?

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(Video features: Dr. Woo Soo Kim; Philip Robbins; Graham Buksa; Eugene Suyu; Logan Mohr; Keith Doyle; Dr. Konrad Walus; Andrew Campbell; and Unnamed Speaker 1 and 2)

On screen text: Will the Next Revolution be 3D Printed?

(Music Up)

(Images of 3D printing throughout video)

Dr. Woo Soo Kim (Strechable Devices Laboratory, SFU) on screen: 3D printing is building up from the bottom, layer by layer, stacking our materials.

Images of 3D printing in action

Philip Robbins (Co-Director, Material Matters) on screen: It’s really a bottom-up and a left-to-right, and a forward-and-back kind of technology.

Unnamed speaker 1 on screen: It can make an experience happen; it can make something more than just an object.

Unnamed speaker 2 on screen: Our whole focus is on making 3D printing technology do what can’t be done.

Graham Buksa (CEO, Rayne Longboards): Build something small, build it really well and go put it out on the market. Go test it. Go ride it.

(Images of skateboarders)

Unnamed speaker 1 on screen: It can be education or it can be prototyping or it can be general exploration of ideas.

Philip Robbins (Co-Director, Material Matters) on screen: It’s not the technology, it’s the ideas that feed into them. That’s what matters.

On screen text (Multimaterials): What kind of materials can 3D printers extrude?

(Music Up)

Eugene Suyu (CEO, Tinkerine and Unnamed Speaker 1) on screen: We’re going to try and build multimaterials into the desktop 3D printing space. You know, the ability to explore carbon-fibre, metal, wood, and to start to get a sense for people what they can start to make for those particular applications.

(Images of 3D production)

Logan Mohr (Student, Emily Carr University): These are some of the earlier test prints that we did on the silicone printer and we are always looking into combinations of materials, really trying to find the right combination of fabric and silicone. So right of the bat, we had all this technical fabric, and we found that fabrics with national fibres in them, like hemp fabrics or something that’s a cotton blend really grabs the silicone because of the micro-porosity of the fibres that are inside of the fabric. So, I printed a channel of the silicone and then bent the copper wire into it and printed a final pass over it so there is all of this kind of hidden rigidity inside of the fabric that you can get out of it.

On screen text: Blue Marble Labs has combined a circuit board with a 3D printed shape to create an air quality measuring device.

Cliff Edwards (Co-founder, Blue Marble Labs) on screen with Keith Doyle:And we’re essentially developing a new wearable air quality monitor. What this will do is allow people to detect the levels of pollution that they are exposed to as they go about their day, wherever they are. And, then they can essentially change their activities and where they go and what they do with this additional data feed. And, this will be important for people with chronic lung disease, essentially.

(Images of air quality monitor)

Keith Doyle (Co-Director, Material Matters) on screen with Cliff Edwards: The freedom of complexity that additive manufacturing or 3D printing allows for iterative space or the iterative design process is really incredible. And, it’s well matched and is an appropriate technology for that space.

On screen text: Aspect Biosystems has developed a means of 3D printing human cells and tissues to test new pharmaceuticals eliminating the need for human and animal testing.

(Music up)

(Images of Aspect Biosystems facilities)

Dr. Konrad Walus (CEO, Aspect Biosystems): So what we are aiming to do is to allow our customers to de-risk their assets going into clinical trials. In other words, they feel more confident about the response of the drug. As well as, allow the customer to test drugs that they may not have otherwise been able to even test. So what we can do is use 3D printed human tissue models for developing new drugs and we’re trying to do is make more advanced models, that better replicate the human tissue physiology. Aspect Biosystems is unique from the technology perspective. So we’ve taken a combination of micro-fluidics technology and combined that with 3D printing technology to make a completely new type of 3D printer that we call lab on a printer. We can perform certain laboratory functions within the print-head itself before the bio-ink is extruded. As the technology advances further, we will get to the point where we can print off full organs. I think within 10-15 years, maybe even less, we’ll be seeing that kind of thing come out.

Andrew Campbell (Industrial Designer): I’m excited about when home printers get robust enough to print a usable part. Something I can put into my ski bindings to replace something or try something new, and go ski in.

On screen logo: Emily Carr University of Art + Design

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