From All Things Considered, on National Public Radio
Artists In Residence Give High-Tech Projects A Human Touch
By Laura Sydell
You may want your kid to major in something practical at college, like engineering, so they can land one of those great jobs at a big tech company. But, you might also urge them to spend time studying the arts. Some tech companies are bringing in artists to help them work out ideas and build cool new things....
Twice a year, Autodesk admits 16 artists to its four-month residency program. They each get full access to the workshops and a stipend. Often the people who apply have backgrounds in both technology and the arts....
Another artist in residence, [School of Information Ph.D. student] Laura Devendorf, was also challenged by the 3-D printers.
"My adviser and I were trying to think of a way to do 3-D printing with everyday materials," she says. "Maybe grabbing sticks or leaves and actually making these 3-D objects out of them."
Three-dimensional printers work by using an extruder that layers up melted material until it creates a solid object. Devendorf realized that it wasn't going to work with sticks. There was something missing from the process — humans.
Devendorf configured the printer to use a laser light to show humans how to do the layering. "I'm actually asking people to perform manually the functions that 3-D printers do," she says.
It's an odd exercise, but one which Devendorf says is meant to raise questions about the role of machine versus human labor....