Welcome to the WTFFF Special Series on 3D Design and 3D Creative Workflow Sponsored by HP

 

Explore HP 3D Design and the HP Create Ecosystem Discovering End-To-End Solutions from Creation to Production, Including the Creative Workflow

The 3D printing industry has gone through a lot of major innovations since the last WTFFF episode was recorded, more than a year ago. A lot of that has been made possible because HP has been quietly investing in research and development for the 3D industry for some years now. In partnership with HP, Tom and Tracy Hazzard launch this 25-episode special series that invites you to explore HP 3D Design and the HP Create Ecosystem. The series will feature interviews of people who have been working in 3D Creative Workflow behind the scenes with HP 3D Print and Z By HP or some of its partner companies, as well as some updates on older episodes that are still very relevant today. In the spirit of change, Tom and Tracy also take the podcast to a whole new level by doing video for the first time. Make sure to watch and subscribe!

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Welcome to the WTFFF Special Series on 3D Design and 3D Creative Workflow Sponsored by HP

Welcome to our Special Series sponsored by HP 3D Print and Z by HP.

When we say sponsored, that sounds passive. This is not passive in any way. It’s been a great collaboration. I’m excited for you to start hearing all of the results of our collaboration together with them.

To give you an idea, we’re doing this first episode after we have done most of the series that we’re doing with HP. I’m happy to let you know that there are a lot of wonderful new things to learn about what’s happening in the 3D printing industry. You might think, “It’s sponsored by HP. Is it all completely self-serving?” I’m happy to say it’s not. HP is doing so much to serve the 3D print industry and community and putting money into helping advance the entire industry. There is much to learn and talk about.

I love the way we all structured this. This is what you can expect. We will talk about global trends, education, creativity and design. We will talk about 3D printing and Design to Print. We will cover the end-to-end solution from creation to production, including the creative workflow. Tom and I love that they wanted to partner with us so that we can talk more about the design. We will talk about 3D design and not just about HP 3D design. We will interject and talk to you about our perspectives as designers for manufacturing and all the things that we have experienced so that we could bring that together. The 3D creative workflow is different than a normal creative workflow. That comes across where it seemed cumbersome to us sometimes. It felt like you were hacking the system. It feels like it’s getting smoother, that’s why it’s exciting again.

It gets smoother and with much more capability. There have been some big advancements in not only to create 3D designs and how HP is helping 3D design and some of the software tools that are available to do more than you have been able to do in the past. Some of them are using VR, AR, and XR. These are cool stuff that is making it easier for you to take what’s in your mind that you want to create and to create it, visualize it in real 3D space. Be uninhibited and be able to convert that to something tangible to have it made. Things in 3D printing itself have come a long way since the last episode.

HP is serving the 3D Print community by creating collaborations that raise the industry tide. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

You have heard us over the years, if you’ve been fans for a while. You’ve heard us complained about colors in 3D and all of those things. A lot of that has changed. It’s time for us to update. I want to give you a heads up so that you understand what you’re going to be getting. The interesting part about the way this series is going to be structured is that we’ve got new interviews with people who you may not have ever met or heard of before. They’re from behind the scenes at HP or some of their partner companies. They’re not always out in the forefront. They might be doing webinars behind the scenes. If you’re not already a client, you haven’t got to meet them. Some of them are the most brilliant, amazing people. They’ve got a corner on the market of brilliance right over there. I have been astounded, not just that their résumés are amazing, but what we’re seeing is that their excitement and their interest in their passion for 3D printing, 3D design, and for the creative workflow. It’s all there. They want this whole thing to improve for themselves as much as for the customers that they have.

Truly, for the whole industry too. I don’t want to overemphasize it, but the reality is even if you are more of someone in the desktop 3D printing world and you’ve never seen or even used an HP 3D printer, that’s okay. There is something in this series for everyone. I’m impressed to see where HP is. It has the vision of what it’s taking in 3D printing is 3D manufacturing. It’s not going beyond samples and prototypes, but the actual product of 3D printing is a big part of it.

I love that we’re having conversations about what they call and what is called an Industrie 4.0. In that industry with an IE like the international standard of it. We’ll be talking about enhancing the design process so we can get to that Industrie 4.0. That’s critically important in how we do things. Otherwise, we’re not going to get to that ideal of 3D manufacturing, quality control, and all the things that we felt were missing in order for us to run a truly end product 3D business. It started to energize us. The other thing that I love is that they’ve decided to incorporate into the series and they hand-selected some of our older episodes and asked us to do updates on those episodes because the content is still extremely relevant.

There might be some new information and new things that we want to bring in to you. To top it all off, we’re doing this amid the COVID-19 shelter in place pandemic. We decided that we would add in a special episode there. If you’re reading this in the future and you feel it’s not relevant, let me tell you it is. There are a lot of things that are accelerating that ecosystem process that is going to make changes to that new Industrie 4.0 for the future. It’s going to become the new standard. I don’t want you to miss that episode thinking that it’s all about that. We’re not talking about illnesses. We’re going to talk about what’s exciting, what’s changing, and what’s being forced into being creative. We’re talking about ingenuity, innovation, and creation in that process.

 

In some ways, surviving and saving people’s lives on how 3D printing has been instrumental in doing that and all these workflows and processes. There is some news relevant to the subject matter in some of these episodes. I also want to be clear, some of these episodes that HP asked us to bring back, they’re not reruns. We are using some of the relevant content from some past episodes, what’s new, what’s changed, and how it’s still relevant. You’re going to get something new out of every single episode for sure, even if you’ve been a long time reader.

I love all of that part of it. I realized that there might be some new people who are coming into this who had never met us before. We didn’t totally introduce this stuff. We gave our names, but let’s make us do a little bit of that. We don’t want the show to be all about us, but we do want to set the tone for those of you who are brand new to us, have never met us before, and understand where we’re coming from.

Why are we bringing this to you? Why us? That’s a good point.

First things first, WTFFF?! has been here for several years. We’ve done 585 episodes according to our counter. We were a little hesitant about whether or not it’s 565 or 585. We’ve covered up the gamut of things. One of the things that we do again and again is we talk about 3D design, design process, design creative flow, how to create a viable and profitable business. Why us? Why can we do that, Tom?

The 3D Printing ecosystem has come a long way since WTFFF recorded our first episode 5 years ago. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

Tracy and I have been in product design and development everywhere from the earliest concept of an idea that might become a product all the way through to design, prototyping, sampling, short-run manufacturing, long-run, huge mass-market manufacturing. We have developed over 250 retail consumer products. You’ve probably bought a lot of them and didn’t even know it because we were always designing behind the scenes for another brand.

We call ourselves ghost designers. We used to design for companies that you’ve heard of. We’ve worked with Herman Miller and Milliken, a large textile company. We’ve worked with lots of furniture companies that you’ve heard of. All of that has been out there. We produced products that are in Target, Walmart, and Costco. We stopped counting a couple of years ago, but they did about $2 billion at that point. Some of the products are still in the market. That’s $2 billion for our clients who are getting it in wholesale. We were selling it at a wholesale price. That’s a lot of products on the market that we have experience in. Why are we successful in that? It’s been a tying thread through every episode that we’ve ever done in the show. We highlight those things that are strengths.

Those things make our process successful and allow us to do it with a small team. One of the things that we’ve had to do was to create this tight hold on the design process, design integrity, and hold it all the way through the first-run production with our clients. Even through sales and marketing presentations, we’ve had to step into almost every aspect of that early start of a business. We had to help product launch with our clients in order to keep control over that.

I love some of the things that I keep hearing in the global trend moves in Industrie 4.0. This is going to allow a big data move so that designers like us could stay in the creative and not have to be all about the business and not have to travel so much to do all of that. This is giving you a little bit of background on a personal note because you’ll hear it interjected from time-to-time. Tom and I are married. We’ve been together for many years. We met on our first day of college at Rhode Island School of Design.

We’ve been working together for most of those years. We’ve spent a little time here and there working for other companies, but the majority of our careers we’ve been independent and working together. We love that. It’s been a wonderful thing. To also bring it back to our 3D printing experience a little bit in designing and developing products for other companies, we’ve been using 3D printing for many years. It was before the reemergence of the desktop 3D printing industry as those longtime patents expired from Stratasys and companies like that. When desktop 3D printing became all the rage, we wanted to jump in, experiment, and learn. As Tracy was an avid reader, we realized that there were a need and an opportunity for another show about 3D printing.

 

There were a couple of shows that were techy-focused. Not people-focused on certain aspects of 3D printing. We thought we could help fill that role and it works well. We’ve had a great response with hundreds of thousands of readers over the years. We’ve enjoyed doing it. As some of our focus has shifted away from product design and development for other companies like we had done for many years, it comes to the point where a combination of where we were at in the industry. It was not a perfect fit for us to keep publishing new episodes every week.

That’s why there’s a pause in our volumes. There are volumes 1, 2, and 3. If this interests you and you’re finding it, you can go back to and read. You can find that on our website at 3DStartPoint.com. The other thing is that we’ve not done a video before. If you’re reading this and you’re like, “They are doing video. I can get them on YouTube.” Yes, you can. You can also catch us on the website and watch the videos there as well. That’s a treat for a change. For those of you who prefer that media.

A 3D design or 3D Printing business is even more accessible and viable right now, thanks to the tremendous industry progress. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

We are putting all these episodes out as videos on our Hazz Design YouTube channel.

The whole series is outlined. There’s all the information on all the new episodes so you can link directly to them, but they’ll also be on the homepage.

What I wanted to make sure you know if you’re reading this that there is a video. For this episode, if you go to the website and check it out, and you can play the video. You can see it or go to the YouTube channel. We have a video background behind us here, which is a repeating image. I would call it an undulating image of one of our 3D print designs in a few different colors.

You won an award. You’re being modest. It was an award-winning tie design. It’s a tie. Tom was famous for going to 3D print events and wearing a 3D-printed tie. It’s an extremely challenging print.

 

It is a complex design. We abstracted it and made it into a cool background for the video. You can check that out. If you’re reading any episode and you’d like to see any of our guest speakers, all the videos will be in the blog post.

A lot of them gave the guest speakers gave us visuals, charts, graphs, and different types of diagrams that will help explain some things. They’re fantastic, but they’re only in the blog posts. We couldn’t show them on video because we didn’t do SlideShare. You’ve got to go to the blog post for the episodes to find them. If you’re having difficulty finding them because we have many posts because we have so many episodes. That’s why we created 3DStartPoint.com/hp. As each new episode airs, the link to that blog post will be there. It will be the place you want to go, plus, if there’s any call to action, somebody says, “We have got a research paper for you or there’s a video on this there.” Those links will also be available right there and shortcuts for you to get those items. I’m excited. I can’t wait to get it under the series and let it go.

I’m excited too. It’s been a blast. It’s exciting stuff so we hope you enjoy it and we’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, comments, you can do that. We are everywhere @3DStartPoint.

We’re everywhere @HazzDesign. @3DStartPoint is more of our team. If you want to get Tom and me, which usually means you want to get me because I’m the one who’s on those social media accounts, you want to go to @HazzDesign. We are excited that you’re joining us for this new series.

 

Important Links

• 3DStartPoint.com/hp
• HP 3D Print
• Z By HP
• Industrie 4.0

 

More About HP

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Experience your design with HP Multi Jet Fusion technology and solutions reinvent design and manufacturing, unlocking the full potential of 3D printing and bringing down the barriers of 3D printing adoption across industries through materials innovation. For more details about Multi Jet Fusion technology click here.

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