Hey folks! I've started a MakerBot Operators profile series called
"Meet the MakerBot Operators" -- please visit the MakerBot blog to see
the first video!
http://bit.ly/c0SU83

For the first video in the Meet the MakerBot Operators series, I
talked with the brilliant Brooklyn teacher and NYC Resistor member Liz
Arum about the students working with “Lola,” the MakerBot her school
purchased for class and student use at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.
I recorded this video earier this year when Nick (then a senior) and
Winter (then a freshmen) were still in school.

This is an experiment and I’m planning on making more of these kinds
of videos. I’d love to get your feedback. Tell me what you think about
the video in the comments!

(Music: composed for and performed on a MakerBot by Bubblyfish, used
with her permission.)

When talking to friends about MakerBots, I often get the question
“What are most people looking to print with it?” With the list of
potential uses long enough to boggle the mind, those asking me this
question are looking for a sense of the culture of printing: what are
people in the community of operators doing with their MakerBot?One
exciting factor about working in a new frontier is that there is no
cut and dry answer to this question. If you are designing and/or
printing objects for the MakerBot, you are contributing to this
discussion-in-progress. And the rapidly expanding community of people
leaping into personal desktop fabrication are laboring everyday to
broaden the list of possible answers.

Take a look at the thousands of objects up at Thingiverse.com, with
all of the new custom “truders,” printheads, and other modifications:
how do I answer the question “what is the MakerBot for?” without
skipping over a number of purposes that are the very reason operator x
or y assembled her MakerBot in the first place?

In the series Meet the MakerBot Operators, I am attempting to give a
suitable, practical answer to this question by taking it directly to
the community, by visiting this new breed of “MakerBot Operators” to
meet their bots and do mini-interviews right there in their printing
nooks. Most will be printed interviews posted here (with photos), but
with every once in a while I plan to work on more videos: “Meet the
MakerBot Operators” (profile) and “MakerBot Operators
Tips” (collaboratively co-created with the subject).

And along with any activities I do (limited, at least at first, to the
northeastern United States), consider this an open call for the
community to jump into this discussion by introducing yourselves. Post
your own “Meet the MakerBot Operators” and “MakerBot Operators Tips”
blog entries, photographs, and videos and drop me a note about it at
griffin at makerbot dot com. I have heard tell that at least one
Operators google group member has started his own video to introduce
us to him -- so let the greetings begin!

– Matt Griffin