Paper Bits

The Free Universal Construction Kit is brilliant:

a collection of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to mate with any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems — enabling radically hybrid Constructivist play and the creation of heretofore impossible designs. (For example, one of the pieces adapts Legos® to Tinkertoys®.) As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet, or unmeetable, by corporate interests.

It’s available here.

lewsid:

The Solar Sinter Project

prostheticknowledge:

Solar Sinter Project by Markus Kayser via Creative Applications

I’m truly blown away by this.

A solar-powered 3D printer in an Egyptian desert creates with sand and magnified sunlight to make glass-based objects.

In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance.
In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology.

Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and trigger dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource - the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking.

More at Creative Applications

The new mad scientists rediscover sanity in an insane world.

When life gives you abundant sunlight and sand, make a fabricator that uses those resources to make stuff, I guess. Also, lemonade.

(via positionaldistortion)