I have a really cool opportunity for any designers looking to use their design skills to positively impact the lives of others, and likely get some press coverage and potentially a paying job at the same time.
I was contacted by James from Made For Me, a 3D printing service that recently expanded operations from Australia and New Zealand to North America. They are working on a great community project with a local university, the University of British Columbia (UBC), here in Canada. The project involves creating 3D printed textural topographic maps to help visually impaired undergraduate students in the biology faculty to learn about biomes and different land cover ecologies in areas that will later be visited for field studies. They are looking for a designer with some 3D design expertise that can help them create textures for the map. The project details are:
Looking for a 3D designer to help create textures that represent different zone types on a topographical map (elevated topographical map already designed)
Project to be used to help visually impaired students at UBC in biology
There will have little or no monetary compensation for the initial prototype, but potential for future work if project is given the green light by the university
UBC will put out a press release if the project is successful -> story VERY likely to get picked up by industry media
Timeline is end of October for completion
If this sounds like an opportunity you’re interested in, let us know by responding to this post and we’ll get in touch to see if you’re a good fit, at which point you’ll be given any other details you need!
Hi NIck, I am interested! It is my main focus to use 3D printing to impact people’s lives in a positive way - I have experience in doing 3D printed work for visually impaired people.
hello
I work in a school and have done work for visually impaired students, we have 3D printers and I have good knowledge of 3D programs and 3D printing, more than happy to help if I can.
Jeremy
Dear Nick
I have a lot of experience in producing colorfull elevated maps.
I didnt understand what exactly you mean by designing texture for elevation maps. Maybe i can help if you explain more about what you are looking for. By the way i will be glad if i can help.
Sirous
Hi everyone, it’s great to see so much interest in this project! I’d like to follow-up with those of you who have posted in order to provide more context for the project and to get an understanding of the 3D printing design work you’ve previously done. I’ll coordinate with Nick to get your contact info and will be in touch directly in the next day or so.
Hey everyone, it looks like James has chosen a designer to work with on this project. Thanks so much for your interest, I’m sure there will be more opportunities like this in the future.
Yo nick, I’m your designer - probably. What I do is write a combination of Processing data conversion sketches (programs) and pass the data into OpenSCAD for modeling. As a sample of my work, here is a link to the Earth drop that I created this way.
Thanks for doing that voodoo that you do so well (heh)!
Les
Thanks for your interest @Les_Hall! Seems like we got a pretty good response for this project so we’ll be on the lookout for more collaboration opportunities in the future!
Thanks for all the interest in this project. It went really well and we ended up with a great looking proof-of-concept 3D printed textured map. If you’re interested to see how things turned out, we have a blog post describing the project, with some great images of the final 3D printed map.
