“We create our designs through an iterative and experimental process. After brainstorming an initial concept, we write a pattern-generating algorithm in the computer through which we further explore our ideas and ultimately create the finished product. You can use the applets we share here to create your own one of a kind jewelry designs or just to play and learn.”

Pinch Bracelet

One thing that really sets Nervous system apart is that your products aren’t just about the final pieces, but the programs you build to generate the designs.

Jessica: That’s what’s always interested us. It’s how we would want to design anything. People at Harvard heard I went to MIT and said, “Oh, do you know how to program computers?” I got pushed into that box, and decided to explore it. I had previously done a lot of programming, and worked as a research assistant at the Media Lab. Jessie’s background is in computer science. We have a shared interest in computational design.

I just opened up one of your applets and started playing with it – it’s really cool. How many of your customers are getting custom jewelry? Is that a big selling point?

Jessica: Conceptually, it is. We have a lot of people who use the applets. But not that many people actually purchase the things they designed themselves. We’re not really pushing that aspect. It’s there as an educational tool which allows people to understand our process.

How did you two meet?

Jessica: We lived in the same dorm. MIT has this crazy dorm system where houses get to choose the people who move into them, so they maintain a certain culture.

Jesse: And we started Nervous System when we were both still in school. At that point, Jessica was studying architecture at Harvard’s GSD and I was at MIT. The jewelry sort of emerged from work we were doing for Jessica’s architecture degree, which used a script to generate a spring mesh.

Filament Necklace

So how did an architecture project transition into designing jewelry?

Jessica: I was just working on a project for school, and making a lot of laser cut models, and eventually 3D-printed models. Some of the pieces were lying around on my desk. The weirdly-cut paper started to curl up. People kept coming up to my desk and asking, “Is that a bracelet?” I started thinking that I could try making bracelets.

Jesse: We threw them up on Etsy, on a whim.

Jessica: Once I did it, there was a tremendous response, so I decided to keep doing it on the side and make a little extra money while I was in school.

What were they made out of?

Jessica: They were polystyrene, which was totally horrible, because they didn’t have longevity. They were very fragile. But we sold them only $15 or something. I was making them at school – I wasn’t considering outsourcing, so they weren’t as durable as I wanted them to be.

You use a lot of unconventional materials for jewelry, like rubber and rapid prototypes.

Jesse: We approach materials practically. We wanted to make stuff out of a strong metal that would be durable and affordable, so we naturally chose stainless steel. We wanted to use a flexible material that wasn’t likely to break, so rubber was the natural choice. We take things as they come. We don’t have a background in jewelry design, so we don’t have a predetermined conception about how things should be made.

Radiolara Necklace

When did Nervous System become more than a side project?

Jessica: I was selling these products, and doing studio and classes, and it got to be too much. I decided to stop doing the jewelry after a month or two. But since we thought it was fun, during the next summer we looked into doing it more seriously and maybe making it a business. We spent time looking for manufacturers, coming up with new designs, and working on the website. By November of 2007, we decided to produce a lot of pieces and try to market them. Every time we had time off, we’d work on this project again.

Jesse: It happened slowly. Our business basically launched that November. We launched the website, did our first show, and met the west coast editor of Metropolis, which led to a great article. That was pretty cool and fortuitous. Then, around February, we moved back to the east coast. The company I’d been working for also had an office in NYC, where I started working part time. In May 2008, we did the ICFF with DesignBoom, and did really well. After that, Nervous System became full-time.

Do you mostly sell through jewelry stores, or through your website?

Jessica: We sell a lot on our website, and wholesale to museum stores, boutiques, and clothing stores that sell jewelry. The larger orders are coming from museum stores. Our wholesale business is getting a lot larger, right now.

Where do you hope for your company to head?

Jessica: We’re interested in larger-scale projects. We don’t innately have any interest in jewelry, in an intellectual way. We want to work on furniture, housewares, and architectural-scale projects. A small building of some sort. Hopefully we’ll start on that in the next year. We’re hoping to move from Boston to a more rural area where we can have the land to do large-scale projects.

Radiolara Brooch

What advice do you have for creatives going into business for themselves?

Jesse: We’ve just focused on doing things that are interesting, exciting and new. We’ve gotten our stuff out there and then let the blogs and press spread it.

Jessica: There’s never been a better time than now to be out on your own, as a designer or businessperson. It’s never been easier to get your product out there. Through the internet, you can get exposed to everybody at almost no cost. You can send your things out to manufacturers and just get a couple pieces made by rapid prototyping. It’s easy to explore and see what it’s like to have a business, without putting in a huge amount of investment. People should just start doing it. Even if it’s just in their weekends or evenings.

Jesse: I was giving a talk yesterday at MassArt, and one thing the professor mentioned ties into that. In traditional manufacturing, the designer might get thousands of units made because that will bring down the cost. Then you’re stuck with thousands of units that you have to sell. I’ve seen people at shows with ceramics they’ve gotten produced, and at the end of the show they just want to give them away. They’ve already paid for the thousands of them, and they just need to get rid of them. But now there are manufacturing technologies that allow designers to do small runs and not make such an investment. You can just test out the waters – see what works and go with that.

The theme they gave us to work with was “rebirth to renewal” – so our idea was to make a key rising up out of a pool of liquid.

After coming up with the concept, we designed the piece in Solidworks and had a vacuum-metalized rapid prototype made.

If you’re in San Francisco, make sure to check out the show in-person. It opens tomorrow – details here).

And if you’re not in SF, check out pictures of the final pieces below:

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this happen! We had a lot of fun.

MakerBot is a pretty new venture, right? How have you gotten so much traction so quickly?

We really just didn’t sleep properly for a few months, dreaming this thing up. When we started, we thought it would just be something that we’d do on the side. But no, it’s been like 80-hour weeks the entire way through! I’d go to bed and I’d literally be dreaming of the machine. My girlfriend would tell me I’d been talking about it in my sleep. Not exactly the most romantic thing!

We started our business in January. And then I took a prototype to SXSW in the middle of March. I would just go to a bar and set it down and start printing out shot glasses and 20-sided dies and giving them away. It was fun. People would come up and ask, “What is that thing?” And I’d say, “It’s the future. It’s a machine that can pretty much make anything you want. Right now it’s making shot glasses.”

3D printing has the potential to be pretty revolutionary. What’s your vision for the future?

Right now we have a way of distributing and manufacturing products that is completely alien, compared to what people were doing 100 years back. We shop for things, often online, and we find the thing that most suits us. We order it. It was probably built very far away, and it ends up getting shipped to some other place and some other place and some other place before it comes to you. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. You could just shop for something online, download a file, and print it out at home on your 3D printer.

The MakerBot

What led you to developing this inexpensive 3D printer?

Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer and I knew each other from NYC Resistor, an electronics hacking collective here in Brooklyn. Zach had been involved in the RepRap project for a couple years, which is a research project to develop self-replicating rapid prototyper. Adam and I had both helped out on that.

A lot of energy had been put into being able to make a machine that could reproduce itself, but you have this chicken and egg problem. In order to make a machine that can reproduce itself, you have to HAVE a machine that’s reproduced itself. And so, we just wanted to make a 3D printer.

We figured out all the things we wanted it to do and mocked something up. I did the design of the body, Adam did the XY, and Zach did the plastic extruder and the electronics, and it all just came together. Most of the parts that go into a MakerBot are stock parts, so that if you need a replacement part, it’s very likely you could just go to the hardware store and get it. That was our focus.

How does it work?

There’s a plastic filament which feeds into the plastic extruder. It gets heated up and it becomes molten, and it comes out the bottom as like a very tiny stream of spaghetti. The machine builds up layers of that molten plastic to form an object.

MakerBot building a model of Walt Disney’s head.

Do you see the technology becoming more refined, so that the prints have a higher clarity to them?

Yep – we’re on the edge of that right now. Right now we get a layer height of about .375 of a millimeter, which is great. But we’d like to get down to .25 of a millimeter. We’ll get there. There’s another version of the plastruder that’s in development.

The challenge is, if you make that little tiny stream of plastic thinner, you have to apply more force. We have to build a slightly more robust, more powerful drive mechanism to get that much force. We’ve done it, but everything has to be completely perfect for it to work. With the layer height of .375, there’s more tolerance.

If someone already has a MakerBot and an upgraded plastruder comes out, can they just switch out that part on their machine?

Yeah, it’s totally modular. It would take you 5 seconds to undo the old plastruder and put the new one in. The cool thing is, because MakerBot is open source, it’s YOURS. You put it together, you know how it works, and you can modify it however you want. If you want to put it on wheels or something crazy, you can do it. We never know what people are going to do with these things.

Who are the people that are buying them?

It’s interesting – our kind of core audience is tinkerers, designers, architects, and just people who want to live in the future. You know what I mean? Where you can imagine something, and then walk over to your MakerBot and print it out, and suddenly it’s real. We’ve had someone at Microsoft buy one, people at Google and Disney, and we just shipped one to NASA.

What are the limits to what a MakerBot can make?

Right now you can do anything 100mm x 100mm x 130mm, which is about 4in x 4in x 6in. People always ask, “Can you make it bigger?” But most people aren’t even using that much space. Most of the things that will take under 3 hours to print will fit in that space.

The other constraint is that right now we don’t have support material. So when you make things that have an overhang, you have to keep the overhang to about 40 degrees. It’s turned out to be a really interesting design constraint. If there’s a box that you have to fit into, it makes your mind think that way. And we’re working on support material. We’ll get it eventually.

Plastic filament, which feeds into the plastruder to print 3D objects.

What colors can you print in?

We have three colors of filament that we sell – white, black, and clear. It’s ABS plastic, which is the same thing that Legos are made out of, so it’s strong and really durable. You can use it for making functional parts.

We can actually get any color we want, it’s just that it costs a bunch of money to have the filament made. We’ll ask our community what they want, but I think at some point we should do red, and blue, and I would love to see glow in the dark! One step at a time.

What has been the hardest part about turning this into a business?

The hardest part? Luckily all the problems we have are usually one-issue problems. We had a problem with missing parts in kits. So we just found a new way to make sure we had no missing parts in kits, and now we have a lot less missing parts in kits. I mean, we’re human, we make errors. Machines don’t do the whole thing. Yet!

What advice do you have for people who want to work on their own projects and turn it into a business?

First of all, do it because you love it. Put your heart into it. Spend all your spare time and energy on it. And commit to it – don’t just dream about it. Commit to doing something on it every day, whether that’s calling somebody to find out if you can get something, or doing design work, or making the things.

I would also say that you should get a community together. We had a community before we started, because we were part of a community of 3D printers before we were a 3D printer manufacturer. But connect with the community around your thing. If you’re going to make toasters, I’m sure there’s a toaster community. It might not be very big, but find them! That way you can learn from them about what works and what doesn’t. They’ll give you opinions and have discussions.

Salt and Pepper Hats designed by Design Glut, available on Thingiverse

Speaking of community, you guys started Thingiverse, which is another really important component of all this.

It is, actually. We’d been really frustrated because there was no place to download the files to make 3D objects. We had all these design files that we were generating, and people were putting them on their own servers, and there was no place to search them. So finally we challenged ourselves to make a site. It took a couple weeks for it to get up and running. It limped along for a while. But people needed it.

It sort of propels the whole thing, because that makes you more inclined to get a MakerBot, if there’s a whole library of designs available that you can download and make right away.

Yeah. Some guy had gotten some sort of medical scan of his skull, and then he uploaded his own skull to Thingiverse. Our intern Will designed some glasses. And now, instead of paying $300 for glasses, you can pay $750 for a MakerBot and print out as many glasses as you want! When he finishes the design for the glasses I’m going to get lenses put in them, just to confirm that they work.

What’s next?

Well, through the end of the year, our goal is to scale up the production of these machines. The holidays are coming, and we keep growing faster than we expect, so we have to be ready! We’re gearing up to get a couple hundred or a thousand machines out there.

Glasses designed by Will Langford, available on Thingiverse

Watch the video below (it may take a second to load):

Screenshot:

Some close-ups of the salt and pepper shakers: