The 3D Printing Revolution Comes to Krakow

In April this year an article in The Economist argued that digitisation in manufacturing will have a disruptive effect every bit as powerful as digitisation has been in the telecoms, photography, music, publishing and film industries. It also argued that these effects will empower small and medium-sized firms and individual entrepreneurs. Launching novel products will become easier and cheaper. Communities offering 3D printing and other grass-roots production services are already forming online. Are we seeing the dawning of a third industrial revolution?

One such community is bringing the revolution to Krakow. Based at Kompany, a co-working space in Kazimierz, Materialination describes itself as: “a community promoting the idea of 3D printing.”

This Saturday, Materialination are holding a combined Andrzejki / Introduction to 3D printing party at Kompany. See the Facebook Andrzejkowe 3D Printing Party! event page.

The Krakow Post invited Materialination to spread the word of their open-source insurgency to our readers:

We would like to share our 3D printer with anybody who is interested in experimenting with 3D printing, and also with more advanced users who now have an opportunity to print their own projects. We are very open and willing to help.

Co-operating is very important for the Materialination community. We are participating in many fantastic projects, and are always ready to support interesting initiatives with knowledge, experience and the other resources of our community.

Our everyday work is printing and ‘materialising’ cool designs. We print stuff from free 3D model libraries such as thingiverse.com, but also objects designed by members of our community.

If you would like to print something in 3D, but you can’t find a good project and don’t want to create it by yourself, you are very welcome to the Materialination community, where you’ll definitely find somebody willing to help you. This kind of competence interchange is very important to us.

We are a community where everybody, even absolute beginners, can come and realise their ideas using our 3D printer. We are open to people with no experience as well as advanced users.

If you have any questions, or would just like to come by and say hello, you can find us at the Kompany co-working space in Krakow. We are also on Facebook: www.facebook.com/materialination and Twitter @materialination.

The founders of the Materialination community have summarised their values in the following ‘Ten Commandments:’

1. We are here to be useful, learn and share from each other.

2. We support creativity and experimentation, and are tolerant of mistakes. If you have a cool idea for something you/we could do here, feel free to suggest it in our forums.

3. We welcome beginners. We were all beginners once.

4. There are no bad questions.

5. We are transparent.

6. We are international. Everyone is welcome here, provided they share our values. If you contribute as well as learn, you are even more welcome.

7. Everyone can contribute something.

8. We support Creative Commons and openness and we will link to and work with everyone and anyone who wants to work with us. For those who are here to make money – welcome – we hope we can help you make a fortune. Read our FAQs about making profits from our community and know how. The more valuable and useful this community is, the more possibilities there will be to find ways to make money from the value being created.

9. We are ambitious and have high standards. We want to be one of the best places in the 3D eco-system to learn, share and create. We will intervene if necessary to keep our community culture positive.

10. ‘We’ and ‘us’ are more powerful and fun than ‘I’ and ‘me.’ We are a community.

Photos: Materialination

One thought on “The 3D Printing Revolution Comes to Krakow

  • December 14, 2012 at 6:51 pm
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    I notice you as President of the Alfa Foundation in Netherlands. On 3 may is a Requiem for Auschwitz premiered in Amsterdam. The concert is then performed in Tilburg, Prague, Budapest and Frankfurt. For more information see http://www.requiemforauschwitz.eu.
    The aim is on 27 January 2013, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Requiem, composed by the Sinti composer Roger Rathgeb to perform in the Philharmony in Cracow. The Requiem project is funded by Governments and private funds. For Cracow it proved not easy to collect these funds. We have now however collected all contributions. Our partner organisation in Poland is led by Mr Roman Kwiatkowski. We do everything to the Requiemletting go. Any surfing on the internet will convince you of the importance. I would greatly appreciate if you would pay attention to this initiative. I’m reachable on 0031681492887.With kind regards, Ton Horn, chairman of Alfa Foundation

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