"pop-up factory" entries

Marcelo Coelho and Colin Raney on 3D printing and the digital manufacturing revolution

The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: Lessons from the Pop-up Factory.

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In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Marcelo Coelho, creative director of Marcelo Coelho Studio, and Colin Raney, chief marketing officer at Formlabs.

Coelho and Raney worked with Cranor on the Pop-up Factory, a production line that manufactured connected devices on the floor of the Solid 2015 conference. The four of us reviewed the process of spinning up the factory (which took just two months from beginning to end), and the impact of live fabrication on attendees at the conference.

Discussion points:

  • Manufacturing as a creative process, and as an input for designers
  • How 3D printing reduces iteration time and enables design and production to occur simultaneously
  • Manufacturing as deployment
  • Why the Pop-up Factory is analogous to the Hollywood model of film production

Read more…

Seeed Studio electronics factory walkthrough

An update from the Pop-up Factory project.

As part of the preparations leading up to the Pop-up Factory installation next week at O’Reilly’s Solid Conference, Marcelo Coelho and I went to China to work with sponsor Seeed Studio’s Shenzhen facility in order to produce parts for more than a thousand Alike wristbands.

Working with Seeed project manager Vivian Zhong, we set up in a conference room for the week to organize logistics for getting neoprene straps and assembled printed circuit boards (PCBA) produced and shipped. We also worked with her to source the components that will be used for the manufacturing demonstration in the Pop-up Factory itself at Solid.

In this video, Zhong shows us what’s going on in the factory, all the way from reels of components through various assembly and testing stations. Although the factory is working on many other projects in addition to Alike, we were fortunate enough to catch up to the Alike PCBA as they were in the testing phase. Read more…

Pop-up factory

An experiment at Solid tests a manufacturing style pioneered by pirates.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to take a tour of the South China manufacturing ecosystem with Andrew “bunnie” Huang. One of the most fascinating things that I saw there were the markets full of funny little mobile phones: Read more…