SketchChair Update #3:
From Wellington to Beijing to Linz.
Hello to all our supporters, friends and collegues!
We're aware that there we've been a bit quiet since the end of last year, and can imagine that a lot of you are wondering what's been happening behind the scenes! Here's a summary of what we've been up to and what's coming up over the next few months.
The Past Six Months
First of all, the public release of SketchChair beta is still coming! We regret that the release has been pushed forward so many months, and are sorry that we have not been able to fully disclose the developments that have been progressing behind the scenes. Late last year, we were approached by a large company who was very interested in investing in the project and supporting the SketchChair system in a number of ways. Since then we have been discussing and planning an ideal collaboration for everybody involved, with significant benefits for the project. Unfortunately in the end we were unable to bring these talks to a successful conclusion, but despite not reaching a deal we have learnt much from this process and have gained a lot of great feedback along the way. Now that the discussions have just recently come to a close we can finally reveal this to you all.
These discussions took a bit of a toll on our project schedule, but please be assured, SketchChair development has not stopped! The software has seen several updates over these months, bugs have been fixed, features added and designs tested and fabricated. We are moving forward with a new schedule, with the beta release slated to go public in mid September, and collaborators will be able to test the official release long before this! And, as always, SketchChair, and all the content in the SketchChair.cc design library will be available for free and open source!
Thank You DesForm!
The VUW School of Design put up a great exhibition for April's DesForm conference, and we'd like to extend a big thank you to everybody involved for providing us with the opportunity to produce so many SketchChair prototypes and miniatures for inclusion in the show.
Sketchchair designs alongside Vitra Design Museum Miniatures from the School of Design's collection.
Thank You Maker Carnival!
It was also very exciting to have been invited to attend China's first 'Global Mass Creation and Open-source Sharing Faire', Maker Carnival, in Beijing! We'd like to congratulate the Beijing Makerspace, the CMoDA Museum of Digital Arts and everyone else involved in putting together the impressive event, as well as a big thank you for hosting us. We look forward to attending the next Maker Carnival!
Justin Wang of the Beijing Maker Space tries out SketchChair Alpha on their huge DIY multi-touch table.
Piccolo - the tiny cnc-bot
Whilst these discussions introduced some delays to our SketchChair schedule, it gave us some time to start working on a separate project, Piccolo, a collaboration with fellow inventors Cheng Xu and Huaishu Peng. We're quite excited about this project and will be posting more Piccolo news later in the year. Please visit piccolo.cc if you'd like to sign-up for updates!
Thank You Open Design Symposium & LiWoLi Festival!
Both SketchChair and Piccolo visited Linz, Austria recently for the annual Open Design Symposium, and the LiWoLi open-source media art festival. This included the workshops, Objects as Information - co-hosted with open design advocate Ronen Kadushen, and Build your Own Piccolo. Thanks very much to Martin Kaltenbrunner and Ushi Reiter for inviting us to these events!
Thanks everybody for your continued support! We keep hearing some great feedback from your guys and we can't wait to see more people using SketchChair to design and prototype their own ideas.
Greg and Tiago
Diatom Studio
