DukeMakers club innovates with 3-D printing

DukeMakers, founded early this year, has built a prosthetic hand for a boy with birth defects and collaborated with FORM magazine to creat 3D printed fashion pieces, among other projects.
DukeMakers, founded early this year, has built a prosthetic hand for a boy with birth defects and collaborated with FORM magazine to creat 3D printed fashion pieces, among other projects.

A new student group is working towards more accessible and flexible 3-D printing for innovators across campus.

DukeMakers, a 3-D printing club founded in January, was inspired by the worldwide maker movement—a movement dedicated to facilitating innovative products and creations in the broad community. The club has undertaken several projects in different fields—including fashion design and biomedical engineering—and hopes to expand beyond campus to other universities in the United States.

“Essentially, we [want to] make the world into Legos,” said junior Ouwen Huang, a computer science major and member of DukeMakers. “When you were a kid, you played with Legos and could build anything with Legos. With 3-D printing, it allows adults to mold whatever you want.”

The club grew from a small gathering of four members to an active club—with more than 40 participants—within a year. So far, the club has successfully built a prosthetic hand for a boy with birth defects and collaborated with FORM Magazine to create 3-D printed fashion pieces.

“Our mission is to build a community of makers on campus,” said junior Ying Wang.

Important on-going projects of the club include the construction of 3-D printing kits. Junior Yitaek Hwang noted that in addition to the five printing kits that are currently being built, the club is expecting a total of nine 3-D printers ready to use by the end of the semester.

“There is a guideline [of building 3-D printers], but it is kind of incomplete,” Hwang said. “So we’ve been just going on YouTube and trying to figure out things on our own.”

In addition to the development of more 3-D printers, the club features various projects initiated by individual members. Wang, for example, was approached by the non-profit organization Life Solutions to work on a water filter project aiming to bring clean water for Ghana.

“Traditionally, BioSand filters are huge and very expensive,” Wang said. “With 3-D printing, the cost is minimized and [we are able to] achieve some really cool things.”

The club currently utilizes available innovation space in the North Building to work on individual projects. Wang noted the they are hoping to expand their physical space in order to undertake more complex projects.

Although Huang, Wang and Hwang were among the original founders of the club, Huang insisted that their hope is to have no hierarchy in the club.

“The maker movement itself started as a grassroots movement,” Huang said. “We don’t want people to see us as the executives of the club. We are all just a group of makers.”

The club is actively seeking collaborating centers across the nation, including a network of 3-D bio-printing of blood vessels at the University of Pennsylvania. Huang added that the future direction of the club mainly depends on what the members want to achieve.

“Once we have an established network of 3-D printers, we will probably consider hosting events in our Maker’s Space once in a while,” Wang said. “Eventually... we want to bring in students that never really had a chance to make things or create things, and we can show them what it’s like to be a maker.”

Wang noted that 3-D printing offers limitless possibilities.

“President Obama mentioned 3-D printing in his State of Union Address, and he also hosted the first White House Maker Faire last year,” Wang said. “We’ll see what our projects are next year, and we can possibly send a team over to the White House maybe every year.”

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