Carbon3D’s premise is the question “What if 3D printing was 100X faster?” Just two years old, the company has already raised over US$50 million in funding towards its goal of modernizing on-demand manufacturing through “transformational advances in 3D hardware, software, and resins.” Their belief is that what we call 3D printing today is actually a misnomer for what is in actuality “2D printing, over and over again”—inkjet printing, basically.
This TED talk from Carbon3D CEO Joseph M. DeSimone, a chemist and material scientist, shows this concept in action, live on stage. DeSimone talks about how his team was inspired by the T-1000 from “Terminator 2” to essentially “grow” printed objects from a puddle of source material. It’s quite amazing to see how he’s able to fabricate an object that is impossible to print with current 3D printing technology, and even impossible to create with traditional injection-molded processes, in less time than it takes for him to finish his ten-minute speech.
Design is a central part of the company’s plan to get fulfill this mission, and Carbon3D is hiring its first designer now. I talked to Carbon3D’s Nathalie Pretzer about the opportunity.
What makes this job unique?
We’re ramping up our organization to introduce our first product to market later this year, and the scope for design is huge! As the first hire on our design team, the right candidate will be spearheading all of our design efforts from product interfaces, to marketing materials, and interior design. We are looking for a UI designer to be a key stakeholder in the definition of the overall customer experience—how they use our products inside and outside the software—leveraging his/her ability to translate ideas about experience into meaningful UI concepts.
What special skills or unusual experience are you looking for in a candidate?
You should be driven by a high level of craft in visual design—you may have 3D modeling and motion design chops—along with the ability to create interaction models. I wouldn’t describe this as unusual but it’s certainly hard to find. You’ll get to stretch your design skills as you assist with video, photography, environmental design and ecommerce.
What’s the role of design at the company now?
You’d be the first hire on our design team. Design is integral to how we think about marketing and product. There is still plenty of room to define and represent design practices in our process.
The right candidate will play a major role in demonstrating the power of design to impact experience. He or she will work very closely with the software engineering team and head of marketing. We are a highly cross-functional group—you’ll get the chance to work with our hardware, software, materials science, marketing, sales and print studio teams.
What’s the first big challenge?
Launch our product! The designer will partner with the head of marketing and the engineering team to build world class web-based and printer-based interfaces while providing design guidance/feedback to agencies across marketing projects.
If you’re interested in this opportunity, read more at Authentic Jobs.
This is the fifth in my occasional series spotlighting interesting job openings for designers. See also my interviews with ESPN, The Coral Project, Digg and Toca Boca.
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