My First Time

The first time I 3D printing anything, I made a gun. It was 2005, and printed in NY by a small 3D printing service bureau that sill is around today.

Described best here “the smoking gun by American design group Design Glut may seems unnecessary for some – who cares to place the cigarette in the ‘gun’ in the moment of the craving? However, necessity is hardly the gist of modern design anymore, but a platform for communicating ideas and expressing messages. With the cigarette in place, the ‘gun’ faces the smoker and the ‘hidden’ metaphor, is ironically, rather obvious.”

Did it stop me from smoking, no?

Did it make me want to 3D print everything, always, forever – yes.

The project was received poorly in my design class, not because of non functional / whimsical nature of the design, but because of the production method.

This was an argument I would come to have many, many times over the rest of my education. The more I outsourced, the more I 3D printed my projects, the general philosophy remained, “you can only understand the nature of form by crafting a product with your hands.”

Ironically, in the end The Smoking Gun was a media darling, and one of the first “products” that established Design Glut as a brand “..known for conceptual, irreverent work. A company that produced objects as much shaped by mass culture as by mass production methods,” (and the occasional 3D printed hundred-off).