Enter the 3D Printed Lamp Design Challenge

A couple of us were chatting with our new Belgian friend Martijn Joris a couple of months ago; we were exploring ideas for a follow-up to the World of Houses Design Challenge from earlier this year. What kinds of things might get SketchUp modelers jazzed about the enormous potential of 3D printing? How about, rather than making a scale model of something, producing the thing itself? Architects rarely get to do that, but it’s something we all dream about. At least I know I do.

In that vein, the folks at Materialise (where Martijn works) have just announced the first-ever 3D Printed Lamp Design Challenge for SketchUp. Design a lamp and submit the model; three winners will get their lamp, complete with a base and everything else that makes it work. The grand prize winner also gets a SketchUp Pro 8 license from us. Some images for inspiration:

Equations by Oleg Kurtsev

Clone Lamp by Irwin Quemener

Armillary Sphere by Patricia Lopes

TulipK by Ben Geebelen

The competition runs until October 25th of this year. Honestly, I think this is one of the coolest SketchUp challenges to come along in quite a while. As 3D modelers, how often do we get to physically hold the thing we’ve designed? I’m thinking about taking the rest of the month off to work on my entry.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist