Announcing the Maker Faire Design Challenge

In the past year or so, we’ve noticed several major publications attempting to interpret the “maker movement” through its sociological, economic, and technological implications. For us, it’s still pretty simple: making things is fun, especially when you do it with friends.

This is, really, why we go to Maker Faires. We love building stuff and learning from other makers. So, looking forward to this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, we’d like to try something new: a collaborative project with the maker community that hacks the greater Maker Faire experience.

Together with the team at MAKE and ShopBot Tools, we’ve cooked up the Maker Faire Design Challenge, a competition to design and fabricate the information kiosk that helps visitors navigate Maker Faire. If your design wins, we’ll work with you and build your project together at Maker Faire Bay Area in May. When the show closes down, your project will join Maker Faire’s event quiver, and the open-sourced design will be shared with Maker Faires worldwide.

The Maker Faire Design Challenge: your chance to hack the festival of hacking.

You’ll find all the details about the competition on Makezine.com, but since you’ve already cozied up to the SketchUpdate, here’s a bit more about how it works:

The design challenge: create an information and wayfinding kiosk that improves the experience of people finding their way around Maker Faire Bay Area (a pretty expansive event). You can enter by filling out this form and including a link to your SketchUp model on 3D Warehouse. And because this is an open-source competition, we’ll curate the best designs and share them with the broader maker community in our open 3D Warehouse collection.

One of our goals for this project is to improve the Maker Faire experience in a sustainable way, so you’ll want to pay close attention to the Challenge Guidelines. We’re looking for a project that’s simple, useful, economical, buildable, reusable, and (for sure) fun. Oh, and it should be made primarily out of CNC’d plywood. For inspiration see: Shelter 2.0, WikiHouse, AtFab, and beyond. Have questions about what makes for a good design? Drop a comment into this forum thread.

On April 21st, we’ll announce the design challenge winner, and here’s where the fun starts: Together with editors from MAKE, the SketchUp team, and our friends at ShopBot, we’ll work together to prep your project for fabrication and then build it with you at Maker Faire Bay Area. Then, we’ll fly you out to Maker Faire Bay Area, and we’ll all get our hands dirty building the thing. So, read-up on the Challenge Guidelines (a design brief, if you will) and show us what you’ve got. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team

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PER/FORM: a live performance-based design competition with SketchUp and Sefaira

A few weeks ago, we blogged about how information modeling works in SketchUp. A data-rich .skp can pull off some complex feats, but we prefer to think about an information model as a simple relationship: graphical geometry with any kind of data associated.

With no data, the model is only a design (and maybe a very good one). Without the model, the data is, perhaps, only a math problem (and maybe a pretty smart one). Put them together, and you have the basis for one incredibly powerful output of information modeling: performance-based design.

Architects who practice performance-based design are often trying to measure, adhere to, or optimize building performance: the measurable index of a building’s energy efficiency or operational cost.

The folks at Sefaira are pretty keen on this idea. Their plugin -- Sefaira for SketchUp -- helps architects make decisions that optimize building performance while designing in SketchUp. So now imagine understanding how early-stage conceptual (or practical) choices might affect a building’s ability to retain or dissipate heat throughout the day. We think this is a powerful way to think about design, so together with Sefaira (and some other friends), we’re hosting a competition focused on performance-based design. We call it PER/FORM.

PER/FORM: a live performance-based design competition

You can learn all about the PER/FORM competition on this site, but here are the basics: After an April 2nd registration deadline*, the competition starts with a design brief and three weeks of access to Sefaira for SketchUp. You’ll also have support from the Sefaira team so that you can learn the ins and outs of performance-based building design.

We’ll select 30 winners from the online round, and -- here’s the kicker -- those finalists will have the opportunity to compete live in the final round at the Pratt Institute's Manhattan campus on May 17th. That’s right: this is going to be a real-deal, big city SketchUp shootout.

The top three designers will take home cash prizes, and the winner will see his or her design featured in Metropolis Magazine. What’s that? You don’t have much experience with energy or information modeling? Well, three weeks of free access to a SketchUp energy modeling plugin sounds like a good place to start, right?

Posted by Mark Harrison, SketchUp Team

*We’re sorry to say that this competition is only open to U.S. and Canada participants. Stay tuned for future contests that don’t have this restriction.

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