Kickstarter

SketchChair Beta is out in the wild!  We're really excited to see it publicly available and in the hands of makers everywhere! Many of you have been experimenting and tinkering with SketchChair, some of you have built your own prototypes, and a few of you have even held SketchChair workshops!

A recent design by @malberto from a SketchChair workshop held by Bilbao Makers

Anybody can sign up at SketchChair.cc to download the public beta and start creating their own designs! You can also share your creations in the online design library, where there are already a number of designs available for download to be modified or fabricated.

You can sign up and download SketchChair Beta here > sketchchair.cc/download

Check out the design library here > sketchchair.cc/designs

If you would like to have a look at the inner workings of SketchChair, the Beta source code is also now available.

Access the SketchChair Code Repository on GitHub > github.com/DiatomStudio/SketchChair

This is final update to the SketchChair Kickstarter page for now. For future updates please sign up to the SketchChair mailing list > sketchchair.cc/signup

Do you want to support more locally produced CNC furniture? You might like to take a look at another awesome Kickstarter project, sharing a lot of values with SketchChair: "This Stool Rocks". Built by London based designer and entrepreneur James Mcbennet, Fabsie.com is an online platform that allows designers to easily fabricate and distribute and their own CNC furniture creations. Check it out and support the campaign!

Thank you to everyone who has supported, and continues to support SketchChair! It is this amazing community that has gotten behind the project that has brought it to life!

Sincerely,

Greg and Tiago

Diatom Studio

Hello to all our supporters! Apologies for cross-posting, but it appears some of you have not been getting our updates via the SketchChair mailing list. Click here to see the full update, sent to the mailing list.

We're aware that there we've been a bit quiet since the end of last year, and can imagine that a lot of you are wondering what's been happening behind the scenes! Here's a summary of what we've been up to and what's coming up over the next few months.

The Past Six Months

First of all, the public release of SketchChair beta is still coming! We regret that the release has been pushed forward so many months, and are sorry that we have not been able to fully disclose the developments that have been progressing behind the scenes. Late last year, we were approached by a large company who was very interested in investing in the project and supporting the SketchChair system in a number of ways. Since then we have been discussing and planning an ideal collaboration for everybody involved, with significant benefits for the project. Unfortunately in the end we were unable to bring these talks to a successful conclusion, but despite not reaching a deal we have learnt much from this process and have gained a lot of great feedback along the way. Now that the discussions have just recently come to a close we can finally reveal this to you all. 

The Next Three Months

These discussions took a bit of a toll on our project schedule, but please be assured, SketchChair development has not stopped! The software has seen several updates over these months, bugs have been fixed, features added and designs tested and fabricated. We are moving forward with a new schedule, with the beta release slated to go public in mid September, and collaborators will be able to test the official release long before this! And, as always, SketchChair, and all the content in the SketchChair.cc design library will be available for free and open source!

Thanks everybody for your continued support! We keep hearing some great feedback from your guys and we can't wait to see more people using SketchChair to design and prototype their own ideas.

Greg and Tiago
Diatom Studio 

It's been a very intense past few months but we're very happy to say that in addition to the Kickstarter series of miniatures, the custom miniatures, educator kits and full size chairs have all been delivered!  SketchChair has also been on the move and making appearances at a flurry of festivals and exhibitions:

We were very proud to present SketchChair at the World Maker Faire in New York!  Two days of non-stop excitement and great discussion.  It was a big pleasure to meet some of our Kickstarter backers and we made plenty of new friends as well - the response to the project was truly overwhelming!  A huge privilege and enormous amounts of fun - we can't wait to attend next year!

Whilst at Maker Faire NY, it was a pleasure to have the chance to share ideas and experiences with Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot.

Two weeks prior to New York, Tiago was able to stop by in Brighton for an impressive mini-maker faire - a treasure trove of exciting projects and creative minds, and a delight to attend.  A big thanks to Andrew Sleigh for inviting us to this!

Back at the end of August we had the good fortune to be invited by Innovation Lab to exhibit at NEXT Aarhus, a conference and exhibition touching on everything exciting that technology and design are bringing in the near future.  We got great feedback from the Danish public and conference attendees, and an interesting look into a very design-centric culture.  Thanks to Innovation Lab for putting on a fantastic event!

Now that the custom miniatures are safely with their owners, we'd also like to present the poster, which provides a look at some of these designs:

[ larger version here ]

All of these designs and more will be available to our collaborators in the design library, and will be openly available under creative commons licenses with the release of the public beta.  It's been great fun building up this collection and we can wait to see these designs out in the wild!

Development is in full swing and we are now up to the 11th iteration of the alpha, featuring much more intelligent packing of cutting patterns, a welcome screen and library page for selecting designs, as well as much more stability and design capability overall.  We are currently very focussed on the design library system and building the architecture for SketchChair's online component.  We're hoping to bring all these elements together into a very stable and usable beta, which we're aiming to make publicly available, and open-source, by the end of the year!

Many thanks to all our supporters for helping bringing this open-source system to life!

Sincerely,

Greg and Tiago,

Diatom Studio.