I like to create things.
My trade as a young man was graphic design, from technician to graphic designer, I loved it, I liked, at the beginning the mastery of tools and techniques, the precision developed in the use of your hands when using one tool or another was something I liked.
Later on the computer appeared and what fascinated me was the fact that you would design something, from your mind, to the screen, and it was not yet real, it was, in the end all in the mind or somewhere in your computer in successions of 0 and 1. Then you would press print and what you had in mind appeared on paper. Magic!
I lost my passion for graphic design when I really got the hang of it. In my estimate, I was really good at my job, probably one of the best on a computer, I understood things very quickly, made deductions, used bugs, linked programs in uncanny ways, invented processes for efficiency, learned incision on my own, screen calibration, inks, separation…. all of that was a challenge, I had no master, no guide, only reasoning, improvising, testing, verifying, building theories out of crumbs of knowledge.
I liked to master all this, I liked the respect of others for my skills, I liked my efficiency and my speed in action.
You see poor quality stuff all over the place, you check the price and it is totally coherent with yours, except that what you see is nonsensical and tasteless. You will see the same kind of design everywhere… Sometimes however you see absolute beauty, I see things that are really good as well on the international scene, I appreciate it a lot, I like beauty, skill, harmony, mindscapes…
What I found then in graphic design I find now in 3D design and 3D printing.
This is magic you see, to me this is science fiction, I heard about it when I was a kid. Those used to be very expensive machines and a bit more than 10 years ago, the patents came into public domain. Hackers and tinkerers grabbed hold of the tech and created machines of their own. The idea was simple, create a printer that is able to create the pieces to build another printer (prusa is doing that today on a mass scale, his printers are produced using pieces printed by his printers), self replication… if you care to look you can probably find hundreds of models you can build yourself, my first printer was a 3Drag, a printer conceived geographically near to me.
I built the printer from a kit, not the kits you get nowadays, it was in 2012 and I had to soldier and mount everything together. When I switched it on, I thought, No way this will work, 70 soldier point, there will be one wire I inverted, or a contact that is not working. And it worked.
This is still amazing to me. You have something in mind and a few hours later you have the object in hand, From energy in your brain into matter.
Isn’t this just amazing?