We ran this pilot as an experiment to determine if and how we can offer 3d printing to the OSU community reliably, affordably, efficiently, and sustainably. How much does it cost to keep the printers supplied? How often do the printers malfunction? How closely can we predict when a job will be finished? What is the demand, and how many printers are needed to keep up? What should staff be trained to do? What should users be expected to know or do? How is providing this resource contributing to our academic mission?
At this point, the Digital Union’s 3D Printing pilot has officially concluded, and we are excited to see the overwhelming amount of interest and demand. Over the course of 3 months, nearly 800 submissions from over 300 users, wow! A lot of you have asked if 3D printing will be back, and whether it will still be free, and well…that’s part of what we will be spending the next few weeks figuring out.
Note to our users: 3D printing has been suspended while we take a hiatus to assess our results. If you’ve received a message that your print job is ready for pickup, please stop by to retrieve your items. Thanks for participating in our pilot, and we look forward to sharing our results with you here in a few weeks!
Even if we are not able to get to your submission, we are happy to see your entries come in! It’s useful for us to see exactly what the demand at OSU looks like in terms of how many people want to use 3d printing, what for, what maintenance is needed for the printers, average cost of supplies, and how to structure such a service to efficiently produce quality prints. Thanks for taking this journey with us, and stay tuned! We’ll be crunching all the data and sharing our results and recommendations with senior leaders at the university to determine if and how 3d printing will be offered going forward.