Last Friday, September 16th, we had the privilege to meet and share our passion for 3D printing with approximately 100x TechWomen leaders in the Autodesk Gallery at One Market Place in San Francisco.
The TechWomen program is organized by the Institute of International Education (IIE)–the same governmental group that is responsible for the Fulbright Scholarship and other programs that embrace their mission “to advance international education and access to education worldwide.”
Each year Autodesk hosts these women for an entire day and provides mentorship along with exposure to design, leadership and product-oriented workshops. Autodesk is one of their first stops during their 6 week Silicon Valley trip and these women spend the entire day learning about topics like leadership to product design.
You3Dit for the second year has participated with Autodesk and works with their top-employees to help facilitate these workshops–illustrating the power and capability of 3D printing to transform manufacturing with a talk co-founder & CEO Chris McCoy gives entitled “iManufacture” (Download the PDF of the iManufacture talk from TechWomen 2016 here).
Lori Chen–You3Dit’s co-founder and COO–also took the opportunity to learn a bit more about Autodesk Fusion360 from our co-presenters Ryan Arnaudin and Taylor Stein from Autodesk. These TechWomen leaders learned how to quickly design an airplane using T-splines and then a bottle cap using more traditional parametric modeling. They both elegantly showed how easy it was to get started with Autodesk Fusion360.
Above: the T-splined airplanes generated by these women were then (upon request) 3D printed during the networking session in the Autodesk Gallery.
“It was pretty amazing what the women were able to CAD up in such a short amount of time…” said Chris D. McCoy. “This is a testament to [Fusion360] and the ‘ease of access’ of the software and their product evangelists, Ryan and Taylor.” Autodesk gives away the Fusion360 licenses for free, for educators, makers and entrepreneurs, per the request of their CEO, Carl Bass.
In a post-event reflection, Chris stated that “the cultural differences between U.S. citizens and these women leaders from the Middle East highlight the opportunities for collaboration…in both directions…and it’s amazing that we can find mutual connection through technology…in this case 3D printing and 3D design. What [Americans] see as ‘problems’ are so relative sometimes when compared to challenges found in other developing nations.”
You3Dit strongly believes that our global network and community could help people find solutions to problems in their regions. Having designers and fabricators in over 30 countries, solutions can be crowdsourced globally and then fabricated locally. Now that these TechWomen leaders know what’s possible, they can begin to support these capabilities back at home.
Any TechWomen 2016 leader who reads this and wants to get their airplane or bottle cap 3D printed, reach out to support@you3dit.com and we can help you get your Fusion360 parts fabricated!
HUGE THANKS and shout outs to Ms. Bobbie Casey from Autodesk Foundation, Mr. Ryan Arnaudin and Taylor Stein for making this event possible! Also big thanks to our SFmototype BotFarm for printing out Lumka’s Fusion360 design file!
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