Episode 011 - Patrick Delorey

A special episode today. Brian was in San Fransisco and dropped by Autodesk's Pier 9 to talk with our good buddy Patrick Delorey. Everything you've ever wondered about digital fabrication and cnc machines is discussed. Along with, Instructables, Fraggle Rock, Maritime law, 3d Printing, CAM, and David Foster Wallace.

***Check out Patrick's New Website here: www.patrickdelorey.com

Download it on iTunes!

Show Notes

• Patrick Delorey is Brooklyn-based a designer/fabricator - check out his website here

• Pier 9 (often referred to as “The Pier” or simply “P9”) is Autodesk’s cutting edge fabrication and research facility on the San Francisco waterfront

• Brian often confuses Pier 9 with Pier 1, which is something else entirely

• To help abate this confusion, Brian now calls it “#1 Pier 9.” This way he still gets the satisfaction of saying both numbers

• The Pier 9 Artists in Residence (AiR) program gives artists, designers, and a motley crew of other makers the chance to work in the Pier 9 facilities with free access to all Autodesk software and one of the badassiest (badest ass?) fabrication facilities outside of an actual factory

• The application process to become an AiR involves proposing and publishing an Instructable. Interested? Apply here

• One of the more disturbing Instructables trends is people casting metal in their own backyards

• “Back Yard Forge” is the name of Brian’s Tennessee-based folk band

• “Clump of Creativity” is Patrick’s band

• Brian and Patrick (and Zach) taught together at CUNY in the Department of Architectural Technology

• Patrick worked as a designer with SITU Studio on their Brooklyn Museum installation, fabricated a lot of white stuff with Snarkitecture and Daniel Arsham, and co-taught at the New Skins Workshop Series around the world with designer/artist Francis Bitonti

• Autodesk Spark is an open and free 3D printing platform

• Autodesk Research and Autodesk Labs are under the umbrella of the Office of the CTO (“OCTO”) whose top-secret robotics research facility is housed at Pier 9

• aaaaahhh ssssshhh push it. NOW PUSH IT REAL GOOD

• Most browsers don’t require you to type in http, but you might need www

• “Applications for QR Codes” is Brian's “Death Cab for Cutie” cover band

• Brian’s unique ability to interrupt his guests is almost O’Reilly-esque

• Due to its acquisition by Autodesk after it had been established as a Rhino plug-in, T-Splines is the only case of Autodesk software running inside of Rhino

• Maritime law, or admiralty law, is a body of law governing maritime issues distinct from the laws of individual nations

• Within Enhance is an app that optimizes weight and volume-to-performance ratio through lattice space structures that can be selectively thickened or thinned via FEA

• This is similar to netfabb Selective Space Structures (3S)

• Autodesk’s Spark-powered Ember 3D printer is capable of printing detail that “cannot be appreciated at a socially acceptable distance”

• It is pointlessly high resolution

• It’s like resolution for the sake of resolution

• One could argue it’s resolution as a means to an end in itself

• Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher is an experimental and slightly secretive design platform focused on generative rather than formal design systems

• Autodesk’s push into CAM has included the acquisition of HSMWorks (now working inside of Inventor and informing Fusion360’s CAM module) and Delcam, makers of PowerMILL and PowerMILL Robot

• A listicle is an internet articles presented in the form of a numbered or bullet point list, presumably because you are too stupid to read paragraphs, or any words at all

• Machines at The Pier (***turn your volume down for the CNC videos***):

  • HAAS CNC lathe

  • HAAS vertical machining center

  • Omax 5-axis waterjet

  • DMS 5-axis CNC router

  • DMG Mori Seiki 11-axis machine

  • Mcor IRIS paper 3D printer

  • 3D Systems ProJet color 3D printer

  • 7 (yes, 7) Objet Connex500 multi-material 3D printers

    • Each printer is named after a different muppet

    • The first Connex500 Brian saw was named Rizzo, leading him to initially believe that the printers were named after characters from Grease

• “Software Metal Tongue” is the name of Brian's metal band

• This Is Water is a commencement speech delivered to the 2005 graduating class of Ohio’s Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace

• Levittown is a Long Island hamlet and the first truly mass-produced suburb. It was built between 1947 and 1951 and was the focus of a Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi studio at Yale following the famous Learning from Las Vegas

• Angry Birds is a video game franchise making use of simple controls and a physics engine popular among children and sad, lonely adults on the subway

• MySpace is some kind of music website these days but used to be a very popular social networking site known for allowing angsty teenagers to tile vertigo-inducing wallpaper and autoplay their questionable music preferences. Also, everyone had to be friends with this guy

• Black Widow is a Grasshopper library by Brian and Patrick that bakes your geometry into Rhino and subsequently deletes your Grasshopper file so you stop fiddling around with design options and MAKE A DECISION FOR GOD’S SAKE

• The MakerBot Rep2 was the greatest desktop FDM printer #RIP

• McMaster-Carr is the greatest website of all time

• Patrick likes to imagine McMaster and Carr as Statler and Waldorf

• Chef’s Table is a Netflix documentary series about… I don’t know. Chefs probably.

• Looking for a scapegoat? Blame it on the boogie

• Will someone please teach me how to dougie

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   1. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes

2. What music are you listening to right now?

   1. Replay Last Night (2013) by Astronautica

   2. Atish's set for the Robot Heart Bus at Burning Man 2014

3. What’s your favorite sci-fi film?

   1. Black Mirror (Patrick loves him some Netflix)

4. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   1. Star Tropics (1990), also Brian’s favorite

   2. Final Fantasy 1 (1987), which was freakin’ impossible

   3. The super-confusing Final Fantasy numbering system, which differed between the US (NES) and Japan (Famicom)

5. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   1. Fraggle Rock (1983-1987)

   2. Specifically, the “Uncle Traveling Matt” segment where a Fraggle in the outside human world writes letters back to the Fraggles

6. What’s in your current “app kit?”

   1. Rhino

   2. Maya

   3. ZBrush (digital painting and sculpting software similar to Autodesk Mudbox)

7. Describe your productivity ritual.

   1. Wake up early, stay late

   2. Just work, more

   3. Not too hung up on rituals or routines

   4. Important to be able to make decisions to keep the work moving forward - parametric software makes it too easy to explore limitless design options which can paralyze a project

8. What’s something that recently blew your mind?

   1. Using the waterjet cutter at Pier 9 to raster etch materials as opposed to the typical through-cut operation

   2. The Ember’s incredible 3D print resolution

9. What is the most irritating part of your day? The most enjoyable?

   1. The best part is finishing something - the sense of accomplishment

   2. The worst part is running into roadblocks where you’re put at someone else’s mercy, being put on hold and waiting for responses

10. If you could have a tea party with any 3 people, dead or alive, who would they be?

    1. McMaster

    2. Carr

    3. Grainger

11. What piece of advice would you give to someone studying architecture?

    1. See architecture as a broader design education - the principles taught in architecture school apply across the board and the possibilities for applying these skills in the professional world are diverse

    2. Be ambitious - architecture is an aspirational profession

    3. Root your work in making

    4. Understand what is “possibly plannable” - you can’t anticipate every design outcome so sometimes it’s best to engage with a material without too much thought so you have something from which you can learn and to which you can respond

On Designalyze, we analyze what makes thought leaders in design technology tick through informative, insightful, and often humorous interviews. Designalyze is hosted by Zach Downey and Brian Ringley and recorded in DUMBO, Brooklyn. For design technology tutorials and content visit us at http://designalyze.com