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Disruptions: The 3-D Printing Free-For-All

By NICK BILTON

| November 13, 2011, 2:17 pm

 

Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Downloading — quite often stealing, in the eyes of the law — music, movies, books and photos is easier than bobbing for apples in a bucket without water. It has kept legions of lawyers employed fighting copyright violations without a whole lot to show for their efforts in the past decade.

You think that was bad? Just wait until we can copy physical things.

It won’t be long before people have a 3-D printer sitting at home alongside its old inkjet counterpart. These 3-D printers, some already costing less than a computer did in 1999, can print objects by spraying layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes. People can download plans for an object, hit print, and a few minutes later have it in their hands.

Call it the Industrial Revolution 2.0. Not only will it change the nature of manufacturing, but it will further challenge our concept of ownership and copyright. Suppose you covet a lovely new mug at a friend’s house. So you snap a few pictures of it. Software renders those photos into designs that you use to print copies of the mug on your home 3-D printer.

Did you break the law by doing this? You might think so, but surprisingly, you didn’t.

What about a lamp, a vase, an iPhone protective cover, board game pieces, wall hooks, even large pieces of furniture? In each of these cases, if you copy them, it’s highly unlikely that you’re breaking any copyright laws.

“Copyright doesn’t necessarily protect useful things,” said Michael Weinberg, a senior staff attorney with Public Knowledge, a Washington digital advocacy group. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected.”

When I posed my mug scenario to Mr. Weinberg, he responded: “If you took that mug and went to a pottery class and remade it, would you be asking me the same questions about breaking a copyright law? No.” Just because new tools arrive, like 3-D printers and digital files that make it easier to recreate an object, he said, it doesn’t mean people break the law when using them.

But it could turn design and manufacturing into the Wild West. That’s already happening on Thingiverse, a free online site that offers schematics of more than 15,000 objects. Thomas Lombardi, a 3-D printer owner and regular contributor to Thingiverse, uploaded a free design for a “Lucky Charms Cereal Sifter.” This brilliant piece of American engineering is a cup with several holes in the bottom. When you pour Lucky Charms cereal into the sifter and shake it from side to side, the cereal falls through the holes and the marshmallow charms — clearly the most sought-after part of the product — stay in the sifter, leaving you with nothing but marshmallowy goodness to pour into a bowl.

After Mr. Lombardi posted his invention on Thingiverse, someone else downloaded the design and began selling a finished Lucky Charms Cereal Sifter on a competing Web site for $30.

Because the sifter is a useful object (although some might argue otherwise) and not simply decorative, there was nothing Mr. Lombardi could have done to stop them.

A recent research paper published by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., titled “The Future of Open Fabrication,” says 3-D printing will be “manufacturing’s Big Bang.” as jobs in manufacturing, many overseas, and jobs shipping products around the globe are replaced by companies setting up 3-D fabrication labs in stores to print objects rather than ship them.

The disregard for copyright smoothes the way for this shift. Downloading music online prospered because it was quicker and easier to press a button than go to a store to buy a CD. Given the choice to download a mug, or deal with Ikea on a Saturday afternoon, which one do you think you would choose?

Fauxbergé eggs

 

Antiques

A Fabergé Exhibition Without ‘Fauxbergés’

Matilda Geddings Gray Foundation Collection

Whatever luxury accessory from the czars’ households that an American collector could desire, Armand Hammer could probably make it materialize. In the 1920s and ’30s Hammer, the manufacturing tycoon, helped supply Western currency to the Soviets, in exchange for their loot of aristocrats’ Fabergé jewelry, Easter eggs, picture frames and stone animals.

His Manhattan gallery told buyers that the wares had belonged to royalty, whether or not that was true. His picture frames came with Romanov portraits clipped from postcards and newspapers. He used Fabergé hallmarking tools to reattribute early 1900s pieces made by other Russian goldsmiths or their French archrival Cartier.

“He was playing a rather shady role at the time,” said Géza von Habsburg, the main curator of “Fabergé Revealed,” a retrospective that opens on July 9 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Hammer’s records of the transactions seem to have vanished. “They were probably very wisely destroyed,” Mr. von Habsburg said, during a recent interview at his suburban New York home.

He has spent two years poring through hundreds of Fabergé pieces and forgeries that he calls “Fauxbergé” in the museum’s collection. Most came from a 1947 bequest by Lillian Thomas Pratt, the wife of a General Motors executive in Virginia. She happily went into debt while collecting mainly through Hammer and A La Vieille Russie gallery in New York.

“The little frame with the diamonds seems to haunt me so,” she wrote to A La Vieille Russie in 1935 while placing an order.

Mr. von Habsburg’s research team has scoured assorted European archives for new clues about the collection. Bilingual invoices for Fabergé have emerged: one page in Russian for Nicholas II, and the other in German for his Hessian wife, Alexandra.

The bad news for the Richmond museum: Most of Mrs. Pratt’s two dozen flowers made of semiprecious stones like nephrite and bowenite are Fauxbergé. The telltale signs, the curator explained, include clunky arrangements of plant stalks and rigidly outstretched pistils.

The good news: An 1890s enameled Fabergé frame, with a yellow-and-white star and seed pearls around a photo of Grand Duchess Tatiana, really did belong to the last czar. Hammer had told Mrs. Pratt that it came from the Alexander Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia. But the memento actually traveled with the family members to their Siberian deathbeds. The head executioner listed it in an inventory of their possessions.

The Virginia Museum has borrowed from a few other collections including the estate of Matilda Geddings Gray, a Louisiana philanthropist who owned Fabergé eggs full of tiny paintings of the czars’ palaces. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be borrowing her holdings, which had long been on view at the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville.) Arthur and Dorothy McFerrin, chemical magnates in Texas who have been avidly buying Fabergé since 2005, have lent pieces that they acquired in 2009 at Sotheby’s in London. At the auction heirs of Maria Pavlovna, an aunt of Nicholas II, sold about 100 of her bejeweled cigarette cases and cufflinks.

The McFerrins’ cigarette cases, made of palisander wood, chartreuse enamel, diamonds and gold, cost up to about $1 million each at Sotheby’s.

The Pavlovna trove turned up three years ago in a forgotten vault in Stockholm; Swedish diplomats had protected it from Bolshevik looters. The provenance and authenticity are ironclad, which is rarely the case for Fabergé that appears out of the blue.

“Of any 10 pieces sent to me as digital images,” Mr. von Habsburg said, “more than nine are forgeries.”

Breast is best

Op-Ed Columnist

The Breast Milk Cure

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: June 22, 2011

DOGON DOUTCHI, Niger

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

Kristof on Malnutrition, and Its Cure

Kristof on Malnutrition, and Its Cure

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Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times

Gayshita Abdullah, the mother of a Tuareg family in Niger, does nurse her baby. But, like many others, she says it's important to give even the smallest babies water on a hot day, a potentially dangerous belief.

What if nutritionists came up with a miracle cure for childhood malnutrition? A protein-rich substance that doesn’t require refrigeration? One that is free and is available even in remote towns like this one in Niger where babies routinely die of hunger-related causes?

Impossible, you say? Actually, this miracle cure already exists. It’s breast milk.

When we think of global poverty, we sometimes assume that the challenges are so vast that any solutions must be extraordinarily complex and expensive. Well, some are. But almost nothing would do as much to fight starvation around the world as the ultimate low-tech solution: exclusive breast-feeding for the first six months of life. That’s the strong recommendation of the World Health Organization.

The paradox is that while this seems so cheap and obvious — virtually instinctive — it’s also rare. Here in Niger, only 9 percent of babies get nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life, according to a 2007 national nutrition survey. At least that’s up from just 1 percent in 1998.

(In the United States, about 13 percent of babies are exclusively breast-fed for six months, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then again, most of the rest get formula, which is pretty safe in America.)

Next door to Niger in Burkina Faso, fewer than 7 percent of children get breast milk exclusively for six months. In Senegal it’s 14 percent; in Mauritania, 3 percent.

These are some of the countries we’re passing through on my annual win-a-trip journey, this year with a medical student from Atlanta, Saumya Dave, and a teacher from Newark, Noreen Connolly. It’s heartbreaking to see severely malnourished children and to meet mother after mother who has buried children when such a simple life-saving solution is not applied.

The biggest problem is that many mothers believe that breast milk isn’t enough, and that, on a hot day, a child needs water as well.

On a rural road near the remote town of Dogon Doutchi, in southern Niger, we ran into a family of Tuareg nomads traveling north.

“On a hot day, babies need water,” Gayshita Abdullah, the mother, told me. She said she tries to get water from a well, but if there is no well nearby she gets it from a mud puddle.

In fact, most nutritionists are adamant that babies are best off with nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life (they used to recommend four months, but now say six months). And water in poor countries is often contaminated and dangerous for a baby.

Even when the mother is herself malnourished, her body will normally provide enough milk for a baby, nutritionists say.

A 2008 report in The Lancet, the British medical journal, found that a baby that is partially breast-fed is 2.8 times as likely to die as a baby that is exclusively breast-fed for at least five months. A child that is not breast-fed at all is 14.4 times as likely to die.

Over all, The Lancet said, 1.4 million child deaths could be averted each year if babies were breast-fed properly. That’s one child dying unnecessarily every 22 seconds.

“As far as nutritional interventions that have been studied, we have crushing evidence of breast-feeding’s efficacy in reducing child mortality,” said Shawn Baker, a nutrition specialist with Helen Keller International, an aid organization that works on these issues.

“It’s the oldest nutritional intervention known to our species, and it’s available to everybody,” Baker added. “But for a development community too focused on technological fixes, it hasn’t gained the traction it should.”

The challenges with breast-feeding in poor countries are not the kinds that Western women face, and many women in the developing world continue nursing their babies for two years. The biggest problem is giving water or animal milk to babies, especially on hot days. Another is that mothers often doubt the value of colostrum, the first milk after childbirth (which is thick and yellowish and doesn’t look much like milk), and delay nursing for a day or two.

One mother near the town of Dosso, Fati Halidou, who has lost four of her seven children, told me that after childbirth, it is best to give a baby sugar water or Koranic water. This is water made by writing a verse of the Koran on a board and then washing it off; the inky water is thought to protect the child.

It’s not clear why a human instinct to nurse went awry. Does it have something to do with the sexualization of breasts? Or with infant formula manufacturers, who irresponsibly peddled their products in the past but are more restrained now? Or is it just that moms worry that their babies need water on hot days? Nobody really knows.

But what is clear is that there’s a marvelous low-tech solution to infant malnutrition all around us.

Yarn bombing

Graffiti’s Cozy, Feminine Side

Agata Olek

WOOLLY BULLY “Charging Bull,” near Wall Street, was covered in crochet by Olek, an artist, last December. More Photos »

By MALIA WOLLAN

Published: May 18, 2011

THE bronze statue of Rocky near the Philadelphia Museum of Art irked Jessie Hemmons. She found the statue too big, too macho and too touristy, so last month Ms. Hemmons, a 24-year-old artist, bombed him. With pinkish yarn.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Getting Cozy in Public

A Woolly Trend

Using a stepladder and a needle, Ms. Hemmons stitched a fuchsia-colored hooded vest on the fictional boxer with the words “Go See the Art” emblazoned across the front, to prod tourists to visit the museum that so many skip after snapping their photo with the statue.

She calls the act of artistic vandalism “yarn bombing,” adapting a term for plastering an area with graffiti tags.

“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”

Yarn bombing takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars — even objects as big as buses and bridges — have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night.

It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. In Paris, a yarn culprit has filled sidewalk cracks with colorful knots of yarn. In Denver, a group called Ladies Fancywork Society has crocheted tree trunks, park benches and public telephones. Seattle has the YarnCore collective (“Hardcore Chicks With Sharp Sticks”) and Stockholm has the knit crew Masquerade. In London, Knit the City has “yarnstormed” fountains and fences. And in Melbourne, Australia, a woman known as Bali conjures up cozies for bike racks and bus stops.

To record their ephemeral works (the fragile pieces begin to fray within weeks), yarn bombers photograph and videotape their creations and upload them to blogs, social networks and Web sites for all the world to see.

Sometimes called grandma graffiti, the movement got a boost, and a manifesto, in 2009 with the publication of the book “Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti,” by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, knitters from Vancouver, Canada. It is part coffee-table book, with color photographs of creative bombs, and part tutorial, with tips like wearing “ninja” black to avoid capture.

The book borrows from the vernacular of street graffiti and half-jokingly positions yarn bombing as an illicit alternative for knitters bored making yet another Christmas sweater. It asks readers to get off their rocking chairs and “take back the knit.”

Since the book’s publication, Ms. Prain said, she has been getting dozens of e-mails a week from yarn bombers from as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran. The last month has been particularly busy ever since a Canadian knitter declared June 11 International Yarn Bombing Day on Facebook.

Three film crews contacted her about making yarn bombing documentaries, and several graduate students e-mailed her about writing theses on the subject.

Many of these people also reached out to Magda Sayeg, a 37-year-old Texan who is considered by many to be the mother of yarn bombing. By her recollection, it started on a slow day in 2005 at Raye, her quirky boutique in Houston. On a lark, she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the shop’s door handle, a piece she now calls “alpha.”

Passers-by loved it, stopping to admire her handiwork. “People got out of their cars just to come look at it,” she said.

Next, she knitted what looked like a leg warmer for a stop sign down the street; from there she slowly infiltrated Houston with her stitchery. Within a few years, she had tagged dozens of lampposts and stop signs and assembled a crew of fellow yarn bombers she called Knitta Please.

Soon, Ms. Sayeg was commissioned to do larger projects. Photographs of her pieces spread online, inciting other knitters to take up the budding art form.

Yarn bombing grows out of the larger D.I.Y. movement, which seeks to resurrect traditional handicrafts “more typically associated with grandmothers, like knitting, canning, gardening and even raising chickens,” said Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Tex. In March it commissioned Ms. Sayeg to cover the trunks of 99 trees in front of the museum.

“You see the resurgence of handicrafts in art, too,” Ms. Carlozzi said. “It is part of the appeal of yarn bombing: the surprising juxtaposition of something that is clearly personal, labor-intensive and handmade in an urban, industrial environment.”

Not all artists who use yarn in their work are thrilled with the woolly trend.

“I don’t yarn bomb, I make art,” said Agata Oleksiak, 33, an artist in New York who has been enshrouding humans, bicycles and swimming pools in neon-colored crochet since 2003. Last Christmas Eve, Olek, as she prefers to be called, blanketed the “Charging Bull” statue near Wall Street in a pink and purple cozy, and uploaded a video of it to YouTube. “If someone calls my bull a yarn bomb, I get really upset,” she added.

Olek, whose work has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, considers yarn bombing to be the trite work of amateurs and exhibitionists.

“Lots of people have aunts or grandmas who paint,” she said. “Do you want to see that work in the galleries? No. The street is an extension of the gallery. Not everyone’s work deserves to be in public.”

Whether yarn bombing is the work of artists or glorified knitters, the view of law enforcement is clear: it is considered vandalism or littering. Still, the police seem to tolerate it. Yarn bombers say they rarely have run-ins with the law. And in the few instances when they are stopped, yarn bombers say, the police are more likely to laugh at them than issue a summons.

Ms. Prain once tried to yarn bomb a sign post in Washington, in front of F.B.I. headquarters. A security guard wearing a bulletproof vest approached her, she said, and demanded that she stop immediately. “Ma’am,” she recalled him saying, “step away with the knitting.”

Still, yarn bombing seems to be having its moment in pop culture. Fortune 500 companies have paid Ms. Sayeg as much as $20,000 to wrap their wares in yarn. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater last year for a promotional video. The makers of the Smart car flew her to Rome to wrap a car in what looked like 1970s-inspired throw blankets, and Mini Cooper recently commissioned a similar ad.

Ms. Sayeg has so much work that she closed her shop in 2009, moved to Austin and turned her hobby into a full-time job. Clients have included the Montague Street Business Improvement District in Brooklyn, which paid Ms. Sayeg to knit covers for 69 parking meters, and Insight, an Australian company that sells surfing clothing, which has an ad featuring a scantly clad woman riding a yarn-covered scooter. Last month, Ms. Sayeg wrapped all the heating ducts at the Brooklyn offices of Etsy.com.

Companies seem to be attracted to the retro handcrafted cheeriness of yarn. Toyota chose Ms. Sayeg for the Prius sweater project because her work is “optimistic and community oriented,” Sona Iliffe-Moon, a marketing executive for Toyota, wrote in an e-mail.

Ms. Sayeg now has five assistants to help her knit, which she now does primarily on looms rather than needles to meet the demand.

“In the early years I identified with underground graffiti artists,” she said. “Now the very people I feared I would get in trouble with are the ones inviting me to do this work for them.”

Coveting PDX Jewelry

From Cool Hunting:

Sticks & Stones

Deer antler, vegetable ivory and Purpleheart wood make up this Portland

Deer antler, vegetable ivory and Purpleheart wood make up this Portland jeweler's newest edition

Admired by locals in the know, Portland, OR-based Sticks & Stones has flown under the mainstream radar since launching their stunning accessories line in 2009. As the name implies, materials like wood, fine metals and precious stones have remained at the core of their designs. Their recently launched Spring/Summer 2011 collection finds the brand adding an intriguing set of new materials to their lineup, with jewelry made from deer antlers, purpleheart wood and vegetable ivory.

The colors of deer antlers span gorgeous milky white, caramel, stark black and gray. Since deer naturally shed their antlers each season, not only are the animals unharmed but Sticks & Stones makes beautiful use of an otherwise unused material. The deer antler pieces keep to an inherently beautiful earthy vibe, but those looking for a little more can add a premium black diamond set in 18k gold bezel.

Using organic Central American vegetable ivory, Sticks & Stones creates unique pieces like the "Dirty Peach"and the "Egg" (made from the Piassaba Palm). The Purpleheart's unique grain and natural purple pigment make for built-in beauty, which intensifies once exposed to oxygen and light. Once the desired color is reached, rich oils are used to seal its original luster.

Sticks & Stones' arduous production process includes hand sanding to bring the wood to its smoothest state, followed by weeks of curing in oils to ensure the piece is strong enough to withstand all elements the Pacific Northwest is known for. With impeccable craftsmanship and a distinct combination of materials, each handmade piece is truly one of a kind.

Sticks & Stones is available in select stores in Oregon and their online boutique.

 

 

http://www.yeahwewood.com/collections/exotic-woods