Playing With The Future: Our Video Of Pensa Labs’ “DIWire” Hands-On Workshop

Pensa Describes Itself As A “Design and Invention Firm”—Which Fits With The New Hybrid “Techreative” Ethos That Powers Our Brooklyn Tech Triangle—And We Observe & Record The Fruits Of This New Way Of Seeing & Making & Commercializing.

Pensa is a neighbor of ours on Jay Street in DUMBO—one of the City’s “innovation arteries” newly pulsing with geek/chic ideas writ wondrous around the highly animated body-commercial/creative of NeoBrooklyn.

Pensa has recently succeeded so well in our Outre Boro hothouse that they’ve formed Pensa Labs to focus further on making their corporate inventiveness a business proposition all its own.

On 20 November, we joined in the DIWire Workshop—that we promoted and co-hosted—for an evening of eye-opening and unalloyed play with glorious gear.

I invited my friends and colleagues from ORE Design + Technology—hey, we’re teaming up on a really exciting project that I call 3DP(in a)Can—to bring their design sensibilities and CAD files to this Pensa Workshop.

ORE—too!—is on Jay Street. In fact, the company is located in my own building at 68 Jay (3DP Media is in the DUMBO Startup Lab there). One should NOT have to travel far to interact with creative people. In person is—still—the best interface.

ORE has a “street furniture” project that its techreatives are working on. It’s an elegant tubular bike rack. Room for locking up five bikes. Repurposes stainless steel from the strap-hanger stanchions in decommissioned subway cars.

ORE’s visiting five-person crew joined the Workshop with a miniature 3D-Printed—in PLA plastic—model of the bike rack. And, an SVG CAD file of the object. For printing on a DIWire. Post the (in)formal presentation, the OREites got together with the Pensates and—Voila!—”printed” a steel-wire version of the same model. First try! (Granted: the print itself was more-or-less 2D in the process, but one by-hand bend and there was the 3D model—matching up side-by-side and with the same dimensions as its 3DP’d plastic-model version.)

Here’s the Vid of the presentation. Enjoy the fun…and wonder!

C’mon Back!

LAND